Software — Open Source — February 6th, 2026

AMD Introduces New GPU Target To AMDGPU LLVM: GFX1170 "RDNA 4m"
In addition to their ongoing AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end work for upcoming GFX1250 and recently the GFX13 target for their graphics IP, today AMD compiler engineers introduced a new "GFX1170" target to the LLVM codebase that is also called RDNA 4m.
February 6, 2026 — Source or Source

"DHEI" Proposed For Linux To Help Cloud-Native Orchestrators & High Frequency Traders
Sent out today as a request for comments is a new patch series for Dynamic Housekeeping and Enhanced Isolation (DHEI). DHEI aims to provide run-time adjustments to kernel behavior around CPU isolation for helping with latency-sensitive tasks. The expressed goal is for helping cloud-native orchestrators and high frequency trading platforms dynamically re-partition CPU resources without downtime.
February 6, 2026 — Source

DKnife Linux toolkit hijacks router traffic to spy, deliver malware
A newly discovered toolkit called DKnife has been used since 2019 to hijack traffic at the edge-device level and deliver malware in espionage campaigns.
February 6, 2026 — Source

Forget VirtualBox - I discovered a better, more reliable VM manager for Linux
Virt-Manager is a free and easy-to-install virtual machine manager. Here's how it compares to VirtualBox.
February 6, 2026 — Source

GTK Developers Working On Session Saving Support & Better Accessibility This Year
GTK toolkit developers met in Brussels once again for their annual hackfest during FOSDEM week.
February 6, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.18.9 released
The latest point release of the Linux kernel, version 6.18.9, arrives with a focused set of patches that tighten stability and eliminate subtle bugs across many subsystems. It cleans up crashes from driver races in AMDGPU, Intel Xe, and network devices like mlx5e while also correcting misleading error counters on Intel NICs and fixing memory leaks in bcache, btrfs, and NFC routines.
February 6, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernels 6.12.69, 6.6.123, 6.1.162, 5.15.199, 5.10.249 released
Linux Kernel 6.12.69 has been released alongside earlier stable branches such as 5.10.249, 5.15.199, 6.1.162, and 6.6.123, bringing a wide array of bug fixes and feature refinements across the kernel. The log shows improvements to bpf self‑tests, RDMA device handling under Hyper‑V, pinctrl driver changes for Qualcomm SoCs, AMDGPU queue resets, and a critical writeback CPU‑usage fix that stops infinite busy loops when the dirtytime interval is zero.
February 6, 2026 — Source

ML-LIB: Machine Learning Library Proposed For The Linux Kernel
Sent out today as a request for comments (RFC) by a Linux kernel engineer employed by IBM is a machine learning library for the Linux kernel. The intent is on plugging in running ML models to the Linux kernel that could be used for system performance optimizations and various other purposes.
February 6, 2026 — Source

Toyota Developing A Console-Grade, Open-Source Game Engine - Using Flutter & Dart
Well, here's an unexpected combination... Toyota's Toyota Connected North America unit is developing a console-grade open-source game engine. Making it even more unusual is their engineering choices of building around the Flutter toolkit and in turn the Dart programming language. This new game engine creation is called Fluorite.
February 6, 2026 — Source

VRR Improvements Merged To GNOME 50 For Lower Latency, Wayland Commit Timing
While just missing out on the recent Mutter 50 beta release, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of next month's GNOME 50 desktop release are some improvements to the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.
February 6, 2026 — Source

Wine 11.2 Released With More Improvements & 32 Bug Fixes
Wine 11.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release in the road toward the Wine 12.0 stable release next January.
February 6, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 4th, 2026

AMD Expands FPGA Offerings With Mid-Range Kintex UltraScale+ Gen 2
AMD announced today an expansion of their FPGA prodict line-up with the Kintex UltraScale+ Gen 2 for "intelligent, high performance systems" for medical, industrial, and other fields.
February 4, 2026 — Source

ConnectSecure introduces Linux patching capability to simplify cross-distro updates
ConnectSecure announced the launch of a new cross-platform Linux operating system patching capability. The update eliminates the complexity of managing fragmented Linux environments by delivering a single, unified interface for deploying critical security updates across the four most widely used Linux distributions: Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS.
February 4, 2026 — Source

GIMP Post-3.2 Will Be Looking At Hardware Acceleration, Full CMYK & More
With GIMP 3.2 releasing soon, GIMP developer Ondřej Míchal presented at FOSDEM 2026 this past weekend on some of the feature work being eyed for post-3.2 developments.
February 4, 2026 — Source

GNU Coreutils 9.10 Released With Many Improvements
Earlier this week Rust Coreutils 0.6 released while out today is GNU Coreutils 9.10 as the de facto standard for this set of core utilities on Linux systems and other platforms.
February 4, 2026 — Source

Intel Driver Disabling Vulkan Video Encode On Newer Hardware Due To Insufficient Testing
While Vulkan Video is a cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode and decode API that is beginning to gain traction by multimedia applications and frameworks, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has for now taken a step-back on its encode support with newer hardware. Newer Intel graphics hardware is seeing Vulkan Video encode support disabled due to insufficient testing.
February 4, 2026 — Source

libinput 1.31 Bringing Support For Fast Three-Finger Swipes
Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by both modern X.Org Server and Wayland desktop environments.
February 4, 2026 — Source

LibreOffice 26.2 released
LibreOffice 26.2 is the latest free office suite from The Document Foundation, offering improvements in speed, Markdown support, and better Microsoft file compatibility. A performance boost allows for faster opening of large documents and smoother scrolling in Calc, while Markdown import/export enables users to easily convert between formats. While upgrading isn't necessary if your workflow with LibreOffice 26.1 is smooth, the new version solves several long-standing annoyances for power users, such as anchored objects and connector support in Calc.
February 4, 2026 — Source

Mesa Will Now Prevent Compiling With LTO Due To "Random Impossible-To-Debug Bugs"
While link-time optimizations "LTO" can deliver some nice performance benefits out of this compiler optimization technique, it can make debugging said binaries more challenging. Due to various bugs in Mesa being attributed to the use of compiler link-time optimizations when compiling Mesa, the builds are being blocked on using LTO.
February 4, 2026 — Source

Microsoft is even gobbling up PC resources on Linux — Visual Studio Code could be hogging hard drive space
An issue first raised back in 2024 with VS Code continues to plague the official Snap package.
February 4, 2026 — Source

Nginx 1.29.5 and 1.28.2 released
A new security pupdate, Nginx 1.29.5, has been released to fix a critical SSL upstream injection bug (CVE-2026-1642) that could allow attackers to bypass host-based access controls and expose internal data to the internet. This vulnerability affects Nginx instances with SSL termination and is particularly relevant for public-facing servers using TLS. The patch adds proper logging and tightens read-before-write logic to prevent the attack, but users should still upgrade their Nginx version as soon as possible to ensure security.
February 4, 2026 — Source

One Line Fix Coming For Achieving Better Linux Performance On The HP OMEN 8E41 Laptop
A one-line patch to the HP WMI x86 platform driver for Linux was posted for allowing the HP OMEN Transcend Gaming Laptop 14-fb1xxx to correctly hit its rated TDP limit for allowing better performance outside of the Microsoft Windows confines.
February 4, 2026 — Source

OWASP CRS 4.23.0 released
The latest OWASP CRS 4.23.0 release includes new detection rules, false-positive clean-ups, and housekeeping efforts that most users won't notice. The new rules include protection against Vite.js path traversal attacks, fake Mozilla user-agent blocks, and "trap" command block exploitation attempts, as well as PHP session file upload prevention. Additionally, the release fixes several common false-positives, such as ad and tracker cookie noise and malformed SSRF URLs.
February 4, 2026 — Source

PikaOS 26.02.03 released
PikaOS 26.02.03 has been released with a new kernel and drivers, but users who upgraded from an older ISO need to run a migration script to fix their console keymap and encrypted boot issues. The migration involves deleting old config files, setting a generic keymap, fixing package references, installing the kbd stack, refreshing packages, applying the actual keymap, and recreating initramfs images.
February 4, 2026 — Source

This new Linux desktop runs like an app on your existing desktop - and I highly recommend it
Orbitiny is snappy, portable, and feels like a native experience - but it's not. Here's how it works.
February 4, 2026 — Source

Ubuntu 26.04 surprised me - this upcoming release is seriously secure
The next release of Ubuntu desktop Linux is on the horizon, so I dove into the latest daily build to see what was what, and came away nodding my head in approval at the heightened security.
February 4, 2026 — Source

Zen Browser 1.18.4b released
Zen Browser has released version 1.18.4b, which fixes a major issue with drag-and-drop functionality in split views, allowing users to finally reorganize tabs without frustration. The update also includes several minor quality-of-life tweaks and bug fixes, but no new UI features or major changes. Users who regularly work with multiple windows or rely on drag-and-drop for research are recommended to upgrade now, as the fix removes a significant hiccup that can cost minutes of focus.
February 4, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 2nd, 2026

Barman 3.17 released
Barman 3.17, a disaster recovery solution for PostgreSQL, introduces several practical improvements that make remote backups easier, such as allowing commands like list‑backup and get‑wal to run against servers marked inactive so you can query or restore without re‑enabling a node. It also adds safety for S3 Object Lock by aborting deletes when locked objects exist and lets users specify non‑standard SSH ports during restores with a single flag. The release drops the old custom_compression filter, urging teams to switch to built‑in algorithms like gzip, lz4, or zstd for faster, supported compression.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Experimental Linux Code For 1GB PUD-Level THPs Shows 34% Faster Memory Access Times
Early, experimental code for implementing 1GB PUD-level THPs in the Linux kernel are showing positive benchmark results but other upstream stakeholders were surprised by this patch series appearing and it looking like it could be a while until if/when the patches are mainlined for helping to reduce transaction lookaside buffer (TLB) pressure without resorting to Hugetlbfs.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Forget Google Search: I found a search tool that doesn't track me or push AI - and it gets better
YaCy is fully private and can be installed on Linux, Mac, and Windows PCs. Here's my experience so far, and how to use it yourself.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Gear Lever  4.3.1 released
Gear Lever has released version 4.3.1 on Flathub and GitHub, fixing bugs that had frustrated Portuguese users by adding missing pt‑PT translations The update also adds a proper source repository link to the About page, satisfying Flathub's open‑source compliance requirement and allowing anyone to inspect the code behind their AppImages. Additionally, Gear Lever now correctly handles pre‑release GitHub update URLs, pulling the latest "nightly" or "beta" builds without error.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Git 2.53 Released With More Optimizations, One Step Closer To Making Rust Mandatory
While we might see Git 3.0 released around the end of 2026, Git 2.53 is out today as the latest feature release and continuing to make changes with an eye toward that big Git 3.0 milestone.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?
Open source operating system fans, your time has come
February 2, 2026 — Source

Intel ISH Firmware Upstreamed For Linux With Dell's New Panther Lake Laptops
Ahead of Dell's new XPS 14 and XPS 16 laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" expected to be shipping in volume beginning in March, more of the Linux support for these premium Panther Lake laptops continues to be finished up.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Linux From Scratch Abandoning SysVinit Support
Linux From Scratch was one of the holdouts continuing optional SysVinit init system support through 2026, but that's now ending. Linux From Scratch "LFS" and Beyond Linux From Scratch "BLFS" are ending their System V Init support moving forward.
February 2, 2026 — Source

ML4W OS 2.10.0 released
ML4W OS 2.10.0, the latest Hyprland‑based dotfiles collection rebranded from "ML4W Dotfiles", now ships a beta live ISO that boots directly into Hyprland with wallpaper‑derived adaptive material colors, adds a calendar app, improves btop's theme support, and stabilises the Welcome and Settings apps. The ISO is an Arch base configured for systemd‑boot, so you should write it to a UEFI bootable USB; installing on Arch requires running sudo install-ml4w-os from the live session, while other distros can copy dotfiles via the Flathub Dotfiles Installer but still need to resolve dependencies manually.
February 2, 2026 — Source

My proven way to speed up Linux when RAM upgrades aren't worth it (and it's free to do)
RAM prices are out of control. Here's how to speed up Linux without buying more.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks: How China's LoongArch CPU Compares To AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake & Raspberry Pi 5
Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China's Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current generation AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors under Linux. Plus also tossing in the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) for an ARM reference point.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Raspberry Pi Raises Prices As Much As $60 Due To Memory Demand
Last year Raspberry Pi announced price increases due to memory demand. Today they have announced another round of increased prices as a result of the memory shortages going on industry-wide.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls Wrong
Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year's talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10's adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Security Researchers Find Current RISC-V CPU Implementations Coming Up Short
While many open-source enthusiasts like to flaunt RISC-V as not having the security challenges as x86_64 CPUs have seen over the past several years with various speculative execution / side-channel attacks and arguing for the benefits of an open-source ISA in stronger security, in practice it's not so clear-cut. Security researchers at Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found current RISC-V CPU implementations coming up short for their actual security.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Steam Survey Results For January 2026
After Steam on Linux gaming hit a record high in December of 3.58%, the January 2026 numbers are now published.
February 2, 2026 — Source

This Debian-based Linux distro has one of the smartest security features I've tested in years
If you're looking for a bit of extra security with an MX Linux-based distribution, iDeal OS might be an ideal solution.
February 2, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 1st, 2026

AI Arms Race Targets Google TPUs as DOJ Charges Ex-Googler with Espionage
The AI arms race is now in full swing, and corporate espionage is reaching levels beyond what we previously imagined. According to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), former Google software engineer Linwei Ding has been convicted of economic espionage and theft of confidential AI technology, specifically related to Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). An FBI investigation revealed that the ex-Googler was suspected of stealing information about the entire infrastructure surrounding TPUs, including chip architecture, external connectivity, and more.
February 1, 2026 — Source

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues.
'I did not think it was going to happen to me, but here we are'
February 1, 2026 — Source

Arch Linux 2026.02.01 released
Arch Linux has released new install media with kernel version 6.18.7, providing a stable foundation for computing needs. Characterized by its "Keep It Simple" philosophy, Arch Linux offers a straightforward and flexible experience through its optimized packages and community-operated repository. The distribution's community is diverse and supportive, making it an excellent resource for users seeking help or knowledge on various aspects of Arch Linux.
February 1, 2026 — Source

cTGP Graphics Power Setting Coming For Uniwill / TUXEDO Laptops With Linux 7.0
Upstreamed for the Linux 6.19 kernel is the Uniwill laptop platform driver for exposing more features/settings for laptops made by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM, including the laptops from TUXEDO Computers. Coming for the next kernel cycle is further extending the Uniwill platform driver for now having support for adjusting the custom total graphics power "cTGP" for those laptops with a dedicated GPU.
February 1, 2026 — Source

Framework 13 To See Fan Target & Fan Temperature Thresholds Support With Linux 7.0
For newer Framework devices like the Framework 13 AMD that make use of the ChromeOS Embedded Controller (EC), the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel is adding fan target support as well as fan temperature threshold handling.
February 1, 2026 — Source

GNOME Resources 1.10 Adds Monitoring Support For AMD Ryzen AI NPUs
GNOME Resources 1.10 was christened today as the newest version of this modern system monitoring app for the GNOME desktop that is now used by default on the likes of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. With GNOME Resources 1.10 they have added AMD Ryzen AI NPU monitoring support and other new capabilities.
February 1, 2026 — Source

GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" With x86_64, SMP & ~75% Of Debian Packages Building
Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.
February 1, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel AI Chatter, ReactOS Developments & AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Topped January
During the last month on Phoronix were 296 original news articles from the Linux/open-source perspective as well as another 18 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews, written by your's truly. Here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews in the Linux world over the past month.
February 1, 2026 — Source

Linux's b4 Kernel Development Tool Now Dog-Feeding Its AI Agent Code Review Helper
The b4 tool used by Linux kernel developers to help manage their patch workflow around contributions to the Linux kernel has been seeing work on a text user interface to help with AI agent assisted code reviews. This weekend it successfully was dog feeding with b4 review TUI reviewing patches on the b4 tool itself.
February 1, 2026 — Source

PikaOS 26.01.31 released
PikaOS has released version 26.01.31 with several new features and updates. The update includes new install images based on different desktop environments, such as GNOME 49, KDE 6.5.4, Hyprland, Niri, and COSMIC, each offering unique features like improved rendering speed or flexible window management. Additionally, the kernel has been upgraded to 6.18.7 for smoother system performance and stability, and graphics-related updates include the latest Mesa driver.
February 1, 2026 — Source or Source

smolBSD Builds On The NetBSD-MicroVM Kernel For Booting To Service VMs In Milliseconds
A new BSD distribution I only learned about for the first time this weekend is smolBSD, a project built atop the netbsd-MICROVM kernel coming with NetBSD 11 for providing insanely fast booting micro-VMs intended for micro-services and similar environments.
February 1, 2026 — Source

UniGetUI 3.3.7 released
UniGetUI version 3.3.7 has been released, focusing on improving its user interface and stability after some beta testing with .NET 8 and AppSdk 1.7. New features include automatic updates for specific software components, better handling of unfamiliar package versions, and improved detection of the NPM dependency manager. Under the hood, several fixes have been made to address issues such as stuck update checks, failed version upgrades, and crashes during certain update sequences. Additionally, aesthetic upgrades include proper dark mode support and refreshed installer iconography, making the interface more modern and user-friendly.
February 1, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 31st, 2026

Budgie 10.10.1 Released With Better Stability & Improved Labwc Integration
Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January.
January 31, 2026 — Source

GNOME 50 Is No Longer Treating Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" As Experimental
Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature.
January 31, 2026 — Source

Linuxulator-Steam-Utils To Enjoy Steam Play Gaming On FreeBSD & Other Options
Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD.
January 31, 2026 — Source

Nvidia launches official GeForce Now client for Linux in beta
Over 4,500 titles are now available to stream on Linux desktops and laptops
January 31, 2026 — Source

Plasma 6.7 Restoring The Air Plasma Theme, Fixes KWin Issue With Intense Alt+Tab'ing
KDE Plasma developers remain quite busy preparing for the Plasma 6.6 desktop release coming up in a little more than two weeks while at the same time continuing to land early features for the Plasma 6.7 release coming later in the year.
January 31, 2026 — Source

Phosh Mobile Phone UI Making Progress On GTK4 Port
Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon.
January 31, 2026 — Source

The Last Of The Dolby Digital Plus "E-AC3" Patents Might Now Be Expired
For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired.
January 31, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 30th, 2026

AerynOS Establishes Policy Against LLM Contributions, 2026.01 ISO Refresh
In kicking off 2026, AerynOS developers have continued to make progress on their build tooling and infrastructure for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. They have also been working on a new website design and other updated branding to start the new year.
January 30, 2026 — Source

AMD EPYC 9755 Delivers Decisive Performance Leadership Over Xeon 6 Granite Rapids With Nearly 500 Benchmarks
Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P versus AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several months.
January 30, 2026 — Source

GeForce Now launches on Linux with a Flatpak build — native app brings 5K and 360FPS support to Linux gamers
Linux gamers can enjoy all the benefits the GeForce Now native app has over the web browser version.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Intel Releases LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 With New LLM Model Support
Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Intel Xe Linux Driver Updated To Disable GuC Power DCC For Panther Lake
Queued up in DRM-Next for the Intel open-source graphics driver ahead of the Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is expanding GPU temperature sensor reporting, multi-device SVM prep, multi-queue support for Crescent Island, Nova Lake display support, and other feature work. With the Linux 6.19 stable release fast approaching, DRM-Next is now focusing in on reading early fixes with concluding feature activity for this next merge window.
January 30, 2026 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 200 is available for testing
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 200 is now available for testing, featuring a rebase onto Linux kernel 6.18 LTS with improvements in security defenses, performance, and system stability. This update also introduces the new IPFire Domain Blocklist (DBL) system, which aims to block unwanted web traffic by identifying domains that may be malicious. Other changes include updates to the built-in Intrusion Prevention System, reporter utility, OpenVPN configuration system, and various package upgrades for improved security and features.
January 30, 2026 — Source

KDE neon 20260129 released
KDE neon has released its latest version, offering users direct access to the newest KDE Plasma 6.5.5 features and solidifying its position as a platform for exploring cutting-edge software. This distribution is based on Ubuntu's long-term support base and presents unmodified versions of KDE applications exactly how their developers intended, free from proprietary driver tweaks or stability-holding patches by default. KDE neon caters to enthusiasts who want to try out new things quickly and align their systems closely with ongoing KDE development cycles, making it an ideal playground for those excited about rapid software changes.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.6.122 released
Linux Kernel 6.6.122 has been released, featuring bug fixes and enhancements that address various issues with network device drivers, CPU states, wireless drivers, graphics, and filesystems. A notable fix addresses the phylib state machine in network devices, which now correctly handles suspend and resume operations to prevent unnecessary state machine operations and potential crashes. Other updates include improvements to guest XSAVE state handling on x86 systems, fixes for memory leaks in AMDGPU and NTFS3 file systems, and a patch for a crash-causing issue with the ath11k driver.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.12.68 released
The Linux Kernel version 6.12.68 has been released with numerous bug fixes and enhancements. This release addresses several issues, including a previous problem with communication performance regression in vsock/virtio network modules, which has been fixed by using the skb_copy_datagram_from_iter_full() function to properly reset data when errors occur. In addition to this fix, other notable changes include improvements in filesystem security, prevention of potential slowdowns caused by scheduling glitches, and fixes for bitfield write issues in Btrfs.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.18.8 released
Linux Kernel 6.18.8 has been released, featuring several important bug fixes and performance enhancements. The release includes a significant fix for virtual memory management during forks, ensuring that potential security issues are addressed. Another notable change addresses a spurious interrupt problem in the Renesas RZ/V2H(P) driver, which was causing issues during system resume from idle. In addition to these headline fixes, several smaller tweaks and comment cleanups have been integrated into this kernel release.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Linux's ublk Adding Batch I/O Dispatch Capability For Greater Performance
Linux's user-space block device driver framework "ublk" for implementing virtual block device drivers in user-space relayed by IO_uring is introducing batch I/O dispatch infrastructure.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Microsoft Reportedly Working On Building Back Trust In Windows As More Users Leave For Linux
Windows engineers have been tasked with improving some of the core issues plagueing Windows 11.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Nvidia Launches Native GeForce Now App For Linux In Growing Support For The Operating System
Following on from the Steam Deck native app, more Linux users can now make use of GeForce Now.
January 30, 2026 — Source or Watch Video

Open Gaming Collective (OGC) formed to unify Linux gaming
A number of major Linux gaming projects are joining forces to form the Open Gaming Collective. The goal here is to reduce duplicated work across several crucial projects and centralise development efforts for critical components like kernel patches, input frameworks and display compositors.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Open-Source Nova Driver In Linux 7.0 Continues Preparing For NVIDIA Turing GPU Support
This week the Rust DRM changes intended for the Linux 7.0 merge window were sent out by Danilo Krummrich. The Apple Silicon Asahi Linux "AGX" DRM kernel driver still isn't positioned for upstreaming to the mainline kernel so that leaves most of the Rust DRM upstream work currently around the NVIDIA Nova driver as well as the Arm Mali Tyr drivers.
January 30, 2026 — Source

RISC-V User-Space Control Flow Integrity / Shadow Stack Appears Finally Ready
Similar to what has been available on Intel and AMD processors for users with the shadow stack for control-flow integrity, Linux on RISC-V is finally ready to roll-out its user-space control-flow integrity support.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Some Of Linux's Biggest Players Are Unifying Their Gaming Efforts
Some of the best and most popular gaming distributions on Linux are collaborating to make future updates quicker and more stable.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Still Committed To Linux 6.20~7.0 Even If Not Finalized For Release Time
Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn't always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won't be officially out quite in time for the initial ISO release.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 3 Released For Testing
Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Tails 7.4.1 released
Tails 7.4.1 has been released, and it's not just a minor update; there are significant security fixes under the hood. A critical OpenSSL fix has addressed serious vulnerabilities that could have allowed attackers to compromise user anonymity online through Tor relays. Although there's no evidence of these flaws being actively exploited yet, the update still includes other important upgrades, such as an updated Tor client and Thunderbird email app.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.342 Published With Cooperative Matrix Conversion Extension
Following last week's Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension.
January 30, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 19th, 2026

A new Wine update could finally bring Adobe Photoshop to Linux
One developer is taking on Linux's most stubborn compatibility problem
January 19, 2026 — Source or Source

Bazzite Linux 43.20260118 released
Bazzite Linux has been updated to version 43.20260118, bringing several key changes to enhance user experience and resolve existing issues. The update includes a fresh kernel (6.17.7-ba24) for smoother performance across all hardware, as well as updates to system firmware, desktop environments, and security packages. In addition to these major changes, the release also features numerous smaller fixes and tweaks contributed by developers to polish the overall feel of the operating system.
January 19, 2026 — Source

CAKE_MQ Slated For Linux 7.0 To Adapt SCH_CAKE For Today's Multi-Core World
Queued into the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window next month is cake_mq as a multi-queue aware variant of the sch_cake network scheduler. The intent with cake_mq is to better scale the network traffic rate shaper across multiple CPU cores.
January 19, 2026 — Source

How much RAM does your Linux PC actually need in 2026? An expert's sweet spot
Don't settle for the minimum - this is the RAM Linux needs to perform at its fullest potential.
January 19, 2026 — Source

How NVIDIA GB10 Performance With the Dell Pro Max GB10 Compares To The GH200
Earlier this month we looked at the Dell Pro Max GB10 performance up against AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" with the superior performance for the green team for performance and power efficiency. For those wondering how the Dell Pro Max GB10 performance comes up for the much talked about NVIDIA GH200, here are some comparison benchmarks.
January 19, 2026 — Source

How to run Windows apps on Linux with Wine - it's easy
Considering a switch from Windows to Linux? The good news is you don't have to give up your favorite Windows apps. Here's how to run them on Linux.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Intel LLM-Scaler-Omni Update Brings ComfyUI & SGLang Improvements On Arc Graphics
Following last week's updated Intel LLM-Scaler-vLLM release for helping advance vLLM usage on Intel Arc Graphics, LLM Scaler Omni is out with a new release today for that LLM-Scaler environment focused on image / voice / video generation using Omni Studio and Omni Serving modes.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernels 5.15.198, 5.10.248, 6.1.151, and 6.6.121 released
Linux has released several new Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions, including Linux 5.15.198, Linux 5.10.248, Linux 6.1.161, and Linux 6.6.121.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.18.6 released
Linux Kernel 6.18.6 has been released, featuring various bug fixes and improvements contributed by the kernel community. The release includes fixes for several areas, including the Cadence Quasi-SPI driver, which resolved a race condition that could cause lost completion signals, and the SCSI side's sg subsystem, which was experiencing bogus elapsed times due to two separate race conditions. Other notable changes include enabling woofer speakers on Medion NM14LNL systems, improving support for devices handling DSD format, and addressing issues in the CAN network stack, block driver area, and powercap.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.19-rc6 released
Linus Torvalds has announced the sixth release candidate for Linux Kernel 6.19, which is slightly larger than usual due to a backlog of work from the holiday season or random fluctuations in pull request timings. The kernel appears stable but still needs thorough testing before being called stable. This release candidate features significant updates to drivers, networking, and GPU drivers, as well as bug fixes and performance improvements across various areas, including memory management, security posture, and hardware platforms.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Linux versus Windows 11: Proton PC Gaming GPU Benchmarks on Bazzite
What if you could move beyond the frustrations of Windows 11 gaming, bloated updates, intrusive data collection, and system inefficiencies, and embrace a platform designed to give you more control? In this guide, Gamers Nexus explains how the Linux-based Bazzite distribution is reshaping gaming benchmarks, offering a compelling alternative to the Windows ecosystem. With the rise of Linux gaming fueled by advancements like SteamOS and Proton, Bazzite stands out as a promising contender, aiming to deliver a smoother and more reliable experience.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Mozilla Now Providing RPM Packages For Firefox Nightly Builds
In late 2023 Mozilla began providing Debian packages of Firefox Nightly builds complete with an APT repository. Those on Debian/Ubuntu distributions have a much easier path for enjoying Firefox Nightly since then and now Mozilla engineers are providing similar RPM builds of Firefox nightly too.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Myrlyn 1.0 Released For Package Manager GUI Spawned By SUSE's Hack Week
Myrlyn 1.0 was released today as the package manager GUI developed by SUSE engineers and started out just over one year ago during a SUSE Hack Week event as a SUSE/Qt package manager program not dependent upon YaST or Ruby.
January 19, 2026 — Source

New Patches Provide HDMI VRR & Auto Low Latency Mode Gaming Features For AMD Linux GPU Driver
Support for newer HDMI features in the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver have been limited due to being blocked by the HDMI Forum. There are though some new HDMI gaming features being enabled via new AMDGPU kernel driver patches that are coming outside of AMD and based on public knowledge and/or "trying things out until they work/break" for functionality like HDMI Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Auto Low Latency Mode.
January 19, 2026 — Source

OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE To Provide A Security & Performance Win For Dealing With Containers
A new feature expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is adding an OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE flag for the open_tree() system call. This OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE option can provide a nice performance win with added security benefits if you are dealing a lot with containerized workloads on Linux.
January 19, 2026 — Source or Source

Opera's gamer-centric browser is coming to Steam Deck and Linux — raising questions about whether Windows is losing its grip on PC gaming
With Linux adoption climbing and frustration growing around Windows AI features, Opera GX's Linux plans feel timely and potentially significant for everyday users.
January 19, 2026 — Source

RADV Vulkan Driver Now Implements HPLOC For Even Faster Ray-Tracing Performance
There have been a number of nice RADV driver Vulkan ray-tracing performance optimizations for Mesa in recent times... Here is yet another merge request now merged for Mesa 26.0 and helping deliver some nice performance uplift for ray-traced games on Linux. And, yes, this is yet another Valve contribution to this open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Revocable Resource Management Appears On Track For Linux 7.0
A new feature that appears ready for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle is revocable resource management.
January 19, 2026 — Source

SPDX SBOM Generation Tool Proposed For The Linux Kernel
For those organizations on the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) bandwagon for increasing transparency around software components with license compliance, vulnerability management, and securing the software supply chain, proposed patches to the Linux kernel would introduce an SPDX SBOM Generation Tool.
January 19, 2026 — Source

What is Bazzite, and is it better than Windows for PC gaming? I installed this trending Linux distribution to see for myself
Let's see if this emerging distro is a threat to Windows, or if it lacks too many features to appeal outside the PC gaming crowd.
January 19, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 15th, 2026

Burn 0.20 Released: Rust-Based Deep Learning With Speedy Perf Across CPUs & GPUs
A significant update to Burn was released today, the MIT and Apache 2.0 licensed tensor library and deep learning framework written in the Rust programming language. Burn 0.20 brings some low-level changes as it continues to strive to deliver high performance AI across the diverse hardware ecosystem.
January 15, 2026 — Source

Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8: A High-End, Intel + NVIDIA Mobile Workstation Great For Linux Use
For those shopping for an AI-ready mobile workstation with NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 offers a lot of potential for developers, AI researchers, content creators, and others. This Linux-friendly mobile workstation is well built and aligns with ThinkPad P-Series expectations while being ready to be tasked with demanding workloads.
January 15, 2026 — Source

Linux 7.0 To Expand Temperature Reporting For Intel Graphics Cards
The upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle will provide expanded GPU temperature reporting capabilities for Intel graphics cards. Additional temperature sensors will now be exposed under Linux with the Intel Xe driver using the hardware monitoring (HWMON) interface for easy consumption by different Linux user-space software.
January 15, 2026 — Source

OBS Studio 32.1.0 Beta 1 released
A beta version of OBS Studio, 32.1.0 Beta 1, has been released for testing. This new build includes several notable updates and improvements, such as a brand-new audio mixer and an enhanced Add Source dialog that streamlines audio configuration. Additionally, scene management gets a boost with the return of undo/redo functionality, while advanced filtering options have been added to cover various aspects like scale filtering and deinterlacing modes.
January 15, 2026 — Source

Tails 7.4 released
Tails version 7.4 has been released, bringing several new changes and upgrades. One notable improvement is the ability for the system to remember your language preference, keyboard setup, and format choices across sessions, which can be saved onto a USB stick for automatic application on subsequent boots. The update also includes standard software updates, such as a newer version of Tor Browser (15.0.4) and Thunderbird (140.6.0), as well as an updated Linux kernel (v6.12.63).
January 15, 2026 — Source

Ungoogled Chromium 144.0.7559.59-1 released
A new version of Ungoogled Chromium has been released, offering a Google-free alternative to standard browser releases. This version dials back on Google integration by removing features tied to Google domains and blocking tracking requests, resulting in a lighter and more focused browsing experience. Beyond basic privacy tweaks, Ungoogled Chromium also provides users with additional customization options through new command-line switches, flag settings, and search suggestion customizations.
January 15, 2026 — Source

VSCodium 1.108.10359 released
VSCodium, the open-source alternative to Visual Studio Code, has been updated to version 1.108.10359. This release brings several key improvements that refine the user experience, including updating a crucial dependency for GCC setup from version 1 to 2 automatically. The update also focuses on reliability and security, with specific tweaks aimed at smoothing out potential roadblocks during installation or configuration on Windows.
January 15, 2026 — Source

Whisper.cpp 1.8.3 Delivers A "12x Performance Boost" With Integrated Graphics
Whisper.cpp as the open-source high performance inference project built around OpenAI's Whisper and from the same developers as Llama.cpp / GGML is out with a big new release. Whisper.cpp 1.8.3 is capable of delivering a 12x performance boost for systems with integrated AMD and Intel graphics.
January 15, 2026 — Source

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever
Transparently runs 16, 32, and 64-bit Windows apps, but still doesn't use the Microsoft store.
January 15, 2026 — Source

Wireshark 4.6.3 and 4.4.13 released
Wireshark has released new versions of its network protocol analyzer software: 4.6.3 and 4.4.13, focusing on keeping the tool running smoothly and reliably. These updates address various issues, including crashes in specific dissectors and fixes for streaming quirks with RTP Player, among other minor annoyances. The release notes detail what changed in each version, including updates to existing protocols such as DCT2000, DHCP, H.248, and HomePlug AV.
January 15, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 14th, 2026

An Early Run With Ubuntu 26.04 On AMD EPYC Turin - The Current Performance Gains Over Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
There still are several months to go until the official Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release -- including one month until the feature freeze and the future Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel is expected to land too before the latter kernel freeze in early April. But for those curious how Ubuntu 26.04 is looking so far for servers, here are some very early benchmarks of it on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" in its present development state.
January 14, 2026 — Source

Fedora Games Lab Approved To Switch To KDE Plasma, Become A Better Linux Gaming Showcase
Back in December we reported on drafted plans for revitalizing Fedora Games Lab to be a modern Linux gaming showcase. This Fedora Labs initiative has featured some open-source games paired with an Xfce desktop while moving forward they are looking to better position it as a modern Linux gaming showcase.
January 14, 2026 — Source

GlobalFoundries Acquires Synopsys ARC Processor IP, To Be Integrated Into MIPS
Last year GlobalFoundries acquired MIPS while an interesting new development announced today is that GlobalFoundries has acquired the ARC Processor IP and its solutions business from Synopsys. The Synopsys ARC Processor IP will be brought into the MIPS umbrella.
January 14, 2026 — Source

GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha Released With X11 Backend Removed
In preparing for the GNOME 50 Alpha release, the "50.alpha" tags just occurred for the Mutter compositor and GNOME Shell. Most notable with GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha is the X11 back-end indeed being removed to focus exclusively on the Wayland session.
January 14, 2026 — Source

Intel Compute Runtime Updated With Initial Crescent Island & Nova Lake S Support
The Intel Compute Runtime 26.01.36711.4 was published today as their first release of 2026 for this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support across their range of graphics hardware going back to Tiger Lake. Notable with this new Compute Runtime release is having now production-ready Panther Lake support while also introducing early support for next-generation hardware.
January 14, 2026 — Source

Intel Panther Lake GSC Firmware Published Ahead Of Laptop Availability
While Intel has been upstreaming various Panther Lake firmware bits to linux-firmware.git for pairing with their open-source kernel drivers ahead of Core Ultra Series 3 laptops shipping, one piece of the puzzle only published today is the GSC firmware for the Panther Lake graphics.
January 14, 2026 — Source

Linux 7.0 To Focus Just On Full & Lazy Preemption Models For Up-To-Date CPU Archs
A Linux scheduler patch queued up into a TIP branch this past week further restrict is the preemption modes that will be advertised. With it hitting the "sched/core" branch, it will likely be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.0 (or alternatively, what could be known as Linux 6.20 instead).
January 14, 2026 — Source

Manjaro Linux 26.0.1 Anh-Linh released
Manjaro Linux 26.0.1, codenamed Anh-Linh, has been released with several updates and improvements. For GNOME users, the edition now includes updates from September 2025, which may result in fewer bugs and smoother system operation. The release also brings upgrades to Plasma, including rounded window corners, an automatic theme switcher, and improved Application Permissions management.
January 14, 2026 — Source

New RADV Code Can Deliver 10x Faster Ray-Tracing Pipeline Compilation For Some Games
A new merge request opened today for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" by Valve contractor Natalie Vock provides another significant boost for the Vulkan ray-tracing performance in multiple titles.
January 14, 2026 — Source

New "Thames" Linux Accelerator Driver Posted Along With Companion Gallium3D Driver
Thames is a new DRM accelerator driver for Texas Instruments C7x DSPs. The C7x DSPs are found in SoCs like the TI J722S that powers the likes of the BeagleY-AI.
January 14, 2026 — Source

This distro makes it easy to switch from Windows to Linux - here's how
If you're looking to migrate from Windows to Linux, you'll want a distribution with a familiar UI and a dependable base. VailuxOS easily checks both of those boxes.
January 14, 2026 — Source

XWayland RandR Improvements Merged For Kicking Off 2026 X.Org Server Activity
Michel Dänzer of Red Hat has kicked off 2026 xorg-server activity with landing a patch series enhancing the Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension support under XWayland for improving mode handling by X11 clients.
January 14, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 9th, 2026

AMD Enabling New GFX12.1 & More RDNA 3.5 Hardware Blocks With Linux 6.20~7.0
AMD today sent out their latest pull request to DRM-Next of new AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes they are looking to get into the next kernel cycle, which will either be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely be called Linux 7.0. Notable with this week's pull request is enabling a lot of new GPU hardware IP blocks, including GC/GFX 12.1 as a new addition past the current GFX12.0 / RDNA4.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver
Valve released the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta overnight and with it they are finally building the NTSYNC kernel driver for helping accelerate Windows NT synchronization primitives.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Linux 6.19-rc5 To Fix Broken Nouveau Driver With Newer NVIDIA GPUs
Now past the end-of-year holidays, this round of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes for the in-development Linux 6.19 are a bit more meaningful following those light holiday weeks. Sent out today were the DRM fixes for Linux 6.19-rc5 that includes a fix for broken support for newer NVIDIA GPUs on the Nouveau open-source driver.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Manjaro 26.0 Primary Desktop Environments Default to Wayland
If you want to stick with X.Org, you'll be limited to the desktop environments you can choose.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Mesa 26.0 RADV Lands Dedicated Transfer-Only Queue Using SDMA
There is another open-source Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) improvement to look forward to in the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release that was worked on by one of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Qualcomm Sends Out Linux Patches For RAS Support On RISC-V For Reporting Hardware Errors
The latest work by Qualcomm on the RISC-V CPU architecture is sending out their first non-RFC patch series for enabling Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) support by making use of the RISC-V RERI specification. This RISC-V RAS support is useful for conveying hardware errors to users and will be especially important with future RISC-V Linux servers.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Rails 8.1.2 released
Rails 8.1.2 has been officially released, featuring upgrades and bug fixes for various parts of the framework. Active Support received significant updates, including improved handling of delegate methods with BasicObject subclasses, locale inflector work, and enhanced UTF-8 string returns from as_json. Active Record also saw important fixes, such as updated query count management in the RuntimeRegistry and proper handling of SQLite3 schema dumps.
January 9, 2026 — Source

TrueNAS WebShare: ZFS-Backed, Enterprise-Grade File Sharing From The Web Browser
For situations where Samba (SMB) or NFS usage aren't appropriate or desiring the convenience of accessing files from a web browser on any device, TrueNAS is introducing TrueNAS WebShare as an easy-to-use solution for enterprise-grade file sharing in the web browser.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Wine 11.0-rc5 Brings 32 Bug Fixes
With no Wine 11.0 release candidate last Friday due to the New Year festivities, Wine 11.0-rc5 is out today and it comes packing 32 bug fixes for the past two weeks.
January 9, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 8th, 2026

Etnaviv Driver Wires Up PPU Flop Reset Support Needed By Some Vivante Hardware
Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-misc-next changes to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for Vivante graphics/NPU hardware has added a new "PPU flop reset" feature gleaned off studying the downstream vendor kernel driver.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Intel Panther Lake Laptops For Pre-Order Scarce So Far
On Monday at CES Intel announced Panther Lake as Core Ultra Series 3 with the initial laptop designs to be available for pre-order starting the following day, 6 January, while global availability is expected around 27 January. Now a few days after pre-orders opened up, few options are available and some of the models will not be shipping until mid-February.
January 8, 2026 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 199 released
IPFire 2.29 has been released with Core Update 199, which brings improvements to network stability and speed. The update supports WiFi standards, including 6E, allowing for faster wireless connections and better performance with modern hardware. Additionally, IPFire now includes native support for LLDP and CDP, making it easier to see connected devices in complex networks, as well as security and stability updates for the kernel and other core components. Other features include improved Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) handling, updated OpenVPN settings, and fixes for proxy vulnerabilities and web UI bugs.
January 8, 2026 — Source

KDE neon 20260108 released
KDE neon has released its latest version, offering users direct access to cutting-edge software from Ubuntu's long-term support base. This distribution presents unmodified versions of KDE applications and tools exactly as their developers intended, without proprietary driver tweaks or stability-holding patches by default. For enthusiasts who relish trying out new things quickly, KDE neon provides an ideal playground with a targeted rolling release approach that focuses on necessary KDE packages while keeping most system elements stable underneath them.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Linus Torvalds: "The AI Slop Issue Is *NOT* Going To Be Solved With Documentation"
The Linux kernel developers for months now have been debating proposed guidelines for tool-generated submissions to the Linux kernel. As part of the "tools", the main motivator for this documentation has been around the era of AI and large language models with coding assistants and more. Torvalds made some remarks on the Linux kernel mailing list around his belief in focusing the documentation on "tools" rather than explicitly focusing on AI, given the likelihood of AI-assisted contributions continuing regardless of documentation.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Linux 6.18 LTS versus Liquorix Kernel On AMD Ryzen Threadripper Workstation Performance
It's been a while since running benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel as an enthusiast-tailored downstream version of the Linux kernel focused on responsiveness for gaming, audio/video production, and other creator/enthusiast workloads. In today's article is a look at how the latest Liquorix kernel derived from Linux 6.18 is competing against the upstream Linux 6.18 LTS kernel on the same system.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.18.4 and 6.12.64 released
The latest Linux Kernel release, version 6.18.4, has been rolled out with a focus on stability and reliability. One notable tweak is the reversal of a previous change that caused issues for some laptops, specifically the Dell XPS13, due to label-based lookups. Additionally, the kernel has seen solid work aimed at tackling tricky memory issues and resolving problems with device access techniques in VFIO/PCI drivers. The release also adds support for Intel's RAPL interface on specific processors, enhancing power management and efficiency features.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel Considers Linking The Relocatable x86 Kernel As PIE In 2026
To allow for additional security hardening of the Linux kernel, a patch series has been updated more than one year later to link the relocatable x86_64 kernel as Position Independent Executable (PIE) code.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Linux Patches Enable Intel GPU Firmware Updating From Non-x86 Systems
The modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was designed from the start to be more broadly compatible with non-x86 architectures given their discrete graphics processors being front and center, unlike the legacy i915 kernel graphics driver being very x86 minded. While this allows running Intel Arc Graphics on ARM or RISC-V, there are some other kinks still being ironed out with using Intel graphics in the non-x86 world.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Logitech MX Anywhere 3S Mouse With Linux 6.19 Now Supports High Resolution Scrolling
For those that happen to have a Logitech MX Anywhere 3S mouse connected via Bluetooth, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel release is enabling HID++ support for it to enjoy high resolution scrolling and other functionality of the updated protocol.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Mesa 26.0 RADV Merges The Big Ray-Tracing Improvement For UE5 Lumen
The RADV ray-tracing improvement covered earlier this week for some big performance gains for Unreal Engine 5 titles running under Linux thanks to Steam Play has been merged for Mesa 26.0.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Mesa 26.0 Now Supports GPU Hardware Replay With The Intel Xe Kernel Driver
The Intel Mesa graphics drivers have supported a GPU hardware replay feature for making it easier to reproduce issues. But until now that functionality has only worked with the i915 kernel driver while for Mesa 26.0 the Intel Xe driver will also be supported.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Nvidia Brings GeForce Now to Linux and Fire TV
Users can connect flight sticks and throttle systems to their laptops and stream titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
January 8, 2026 — Source

NVIDIA Optimizes Printing Of Linux Memory Stats For 11% System Time Savings
A NVIDIA engineer restructuring some of the printf-related code within the memory resource controller "memcg" statistics printing code to reduce the system time by 11% for dumping those stats.
January 8, 2026 — Source

This free tool gives you one easy way to install apps on Linux and Mac - here's how
With Homebrew, you get access to even more apps - maintained by both Linux and MacOS developers.
January 8, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 7th, 2026

Acer Laptop Battery Control Driver Looks Toward The Upstream Linux Kernel
For those with Acer laptops running Linux on GitHub there has been an out-of-tree driver providing an experimental "acer-wmi-battery" kernel module to allow controlling battery-related features. Now a cleaned-up version of that driver is working on getting into the mainline Linux kernel.
January 7, 2026 — Source

AMD Linux GPU Driver Improvement Coming For DP-HDMI Dongles
For those using a DisplayPort to HDMI dongle currently with the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver may find some higher resolutions / modes unavailable. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for dealing with this situation due to an oversight in the kernel driver.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Compiler-Based Context & Locking Analysis On Deck For Linux 7.0 Paired With Clang 22+
A new feature in the queue for likely introduction with the next version of the Linux kernel (Linux 6.20~7.0) is compiler-based context and locking analysis. This kernel code depends on the yet-to-be-released LLVM Clang 22 compiler but can provide some powerful insights to kernel developers.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Dell Pro Max GB10 versus AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Framework Desktop For Llama.cpp, OpenCL & Vulkan Compute
Over the past number of weeks the Dell Pro Max with GB10 has been undergoing a lot of testing at Phoronix. This NVIDIA GB10 powered mini PC with its 20 Arm cores (10 x Cortex-X925, 10 x Cortex-A725) and Blackwell GPU offers a lot of combined compute potential for AI and other workloads. In this article is a look at how the Dell Pro Max with GB10 competes with AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" within the Framework Desktop SFF PC.
January 7, 2026 — Source

DRM Splash Screen Updated To Simply Drawing A Colored Background, Displaying A BMP Image
Back in October was an initial proposal for a DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple "splash screen" when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Eclipse Foundation and Germany's VDA Expand Open-Source Vehicle Software Pact to 32 Companies
The Eclipse Foundation, an international non-profit that hosts hundreds of open-source software projects, and Germany's automotive industry association, VDA, say they have expanded an industry memorandum to build an "automotive-grade" open-source software ecosystem for software-defined vehicles.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Fish 4.3.3 released
Fish Shell has released version 4.3.3, addressing numerous bugs and introducing beneficial enhancements to improve user experience. The new release fixes issues such as annoying command suggestions not inserting full tokens, soft-wrapped autosuggestions affecting the fish_right_prompt, spurious tmux echo problems, and a theme selection issue with the "tomorrow" theme. In addition to these fixes, Fish 4.3.3 includes upgrades like syntax highlighting for various commands using the --color option and improved command output readability. The release also tweaks sample prompts, themes, and existing file path highlighting in redirection targets.
January 7, 2026 — Source

GLib and Kernel (Raspberry Pi) updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu has released security notices for two vulnerabilities: USN-7942-1 affects GLib libraries in Ubuntu 25.10, 25.04, 24.04 LTS, and 22.04 LTS, while USN-7922-4 affects Linux kernel versions in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS. The GLib vulnerabilities could cause a denial of service or allow execution of arbitrary code if exploited, while the Linux kernel issues may compromise system security.
January 7, 2026 — Source

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger
Proposal targets long-standing behavior as 'an X11ism'
January 7, 2026 — Source

Intel FSP Improvements With Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake"
While for years open-source firmware enthusiasts have been after an open-source Firmware Support Package "FSP" for Intel CPUs and back during Raja Koduri's tenure at Intel it sounded like it might happen, it has yet to happen. But at least with the forthcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" there are some FSP improvements.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Kernel, Dcmtk, Rsync, and more updates for SUSE
Security updates have been released for SUSE Linux, addressing various vulnerabilities and security issues. The updates include patches for the Linux Kernel (important), dcmtk (moderate), libpcap (low), govulncheck-vulndb (moderate), qemu (important), rsync (moderate), and usbmuxd (moderate).
January 7, 2026 — Source

Libpcap update for Fedora
Fedora 43 users are notified of an update for the libpcap package, which provides a system-independent interface for user-level packet capture. The new version is 1.10.6 and includes fixes for a memory corruption vulnerability via malformed MAC-48 address input.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Libsodium update for Slackware
New packages for libsodium are available to fix a security issue in Slackware 15.0 and -current. The update fixes an insufficient validation vulnerability in crypto_core_ed25519_is_valid_point() and can be found at the official Slackware FTP site. To upgrade, users should run the "upgradepkg libsodium-1.0.18-i586-4_slack15.0.txz" command as root. The security issue is documented on the CVE website with ID CVE-2025-69277.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Next-Gen AMD Server SoCs To Enjoy Firmware-Agnostic Platform Configuration Approach
Next-generation AMD server SoCs -- presumably the AMD EPYC "Venice" on Zen 6 -- is poised to introduce a firmware-agnostic platform configuration platform configuration change method/format. This is This aims to improve server platform interoperability and eliminate redundant configuration efforts for different firmware solutions.
January 7, 2026 — Source

NodeJS, Thunderbird, Rsync, and more updates for Oracle Linux
Oracle Linux has released several security updates for various platforms. These updates include bug fixes and enhancements for Oracle Linux 8's nodejs versions (20, 22, and 24), as well as a security update for Thunderbird on Oracle Linux 8. Additionally, security patches have been issued for other applications such as rsync on Oracle Linux 7, mingw-expat on Oracle Linux 8, and tar and gcc-toolset-14-binutils on Oracle Linux 9.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Radeon RADV Vulkan Driver Is On The Verge Of Another Big Ray-Tracing Performance Gain
Natalie Vock as one of the open-source developers on Valve's Linux graphics team has been spearheading another big ray-tracing performance improvement for the AMD Radeon Vulkan driver. RADV ray-tracing performance improved a lot in 2025 but it's looking like 2026 could be even more exciting.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Razer Intros AIKit: an Open-Source Project for Easier Local LLM Development
Razer AIKit is an open-source platform that simplifies the entire AI development lifecycle. It automatically configures GPUs, forms clusters, and optimizes settings for local LLM inference and fine-tuning—delivering cloud-grade performance with lower latency and full local control. Designed for AI researchers and developers, AIKit enables fast, secure, and cost-efficient workflows with a single launch command.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Ruby, Thunderbird, Kernel updates for AlmaLinux
Three AlmaLinux security updates have been released to address potential security vulnerabilities: an update for Ruby (ALSA-2025:23141), which is considered moderate, and two updates for Mozilla Thunderbird and kernel packages, both rated important. The Ruby update fixes Denial of Service issues in the resolv and rexml gems, while the other updates fix various memory safety bugs, use-after-free vulnerabilities, sandbox escapes, and JIT miscompilations in Firefox and the kernel.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Tar, GCC-Toolset, PHP updates for Rocky Linux
Updates are available for several packages, including tar and gcc-toolset-14-binutils, which affect Rocky Linux 9. An update is also available for various PHP modules that affect Rocky Linux 8. Each of these updates addresses security vulnerabilities, with detailed severity ratings available from the CVE list.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Tar, Poppler, Firefox, and more updates for RHEL
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has received several updates, including security fixes for various packages such as tar, Quarkus, Thunderbird, and Firefox. Other updated packages include poppler, Python 3.12, MariaDB, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, httpd, git-lfs, kernel, grafana-pcp, and Red Hat build of Quarkus 3.27.1.SP1. The updates address issues ranging from moderate to important in severity. Multiple security patches have been released for some packages, such as mariadb and git-lfs.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Want to try the original KDE desktop from 1996? I did, and it took me back - here's how
You can revisit the early days of Linux through MiDesktop, a modern fork of the original KDE 1. It's a must-try nostalgic experiment.
January 7, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 6th, 2026

All Fedora 44 KDE Variants To Use Plasma Login Manager Rather Than SDDM
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a Fedora 44 change for switching all KDE variants away from using the SDDM display manager to instead use the newer Plasma Login Manager.
January 6, 2026 — Source

AMD Releases GAIA 0.15 - Positioning It As A Framework/SDK For Building AI PC Agents
Last year AMD announced GAIA as short for "Generative AI Is Awesome". It started off as a Windows-only AI demo but over time added Linux support along with introducing different AI agents. For going along with AMD's AI announcements at CES 2026, AMD released GAIA 0.15 where they are now positioning this software as a framework/SDK for building AI PC agents.
January 6, 2026 — Source

AMD ROCm, open source Nvidia CUDA rival, gets massive Windows & Linux improvements
Alongside new hardware launches of the Ryzen AI 400 series, Ryzen 9850X3D, and new Max+ SKUs, AMD at CES 2026 today has expanded ROCm support across Windows and Linux, boosting AI performance in Ryzen and Radeon platforms.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Digital sovereignty: Linux as an Active Directory domain controller
Instead of Windows Server, you can also use a Linux system with Samba as a domain controller for Active Directory. A reader pointed this out to me some time ago, writing that he uses it in his environment.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Flatpak Exploring GPU Virtualization To Ease Driver Challenges
Open-source developer Sebastian Wick has written a blog post outlining work to improve the graphics driver situation for Flatpaks. Particularly around situations like the NVIDIA driver stack that may depend upon a specific kernel version or where a Flatpak runtime may be end-of-life, dealing with GPU drivers in Flatpaks can be a burden. A solution being explored is GPU virtualization to deal with those GPU driver handling challenges while still providing robust and secure GPU access.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Gentoo Linux Made Progress On RISC-V, WSL & More In 2025 While Pulling In Just $12k USD
The Gentoo Linux project published their 2025 retrospective this week with their many accomplishments, including the recruitment of four more developers and now being up to 31,663 ebuilds and a total of 89GB worth of x86_64 binary packages on mirrors.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Gimp, U-Boot, ImageMagick, Adminer, Ruby-Rmagick, Libsodium updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has released several updates to address security concerns. The updates include fixes for ImageMagick, GIMP, U-Boot, Adminer, and Ruby-RMagick vulnerabilities. Additionally, a libsodium security update was also made available.
January 6, 2026 — Source

GStreamer 1.28-RC1 Brings A Rust-Based GIF Decoder, Other New Rust Components
On Monday the first release candidate of the GStreamer 1.28 multimedia framework was released. As is a recurring focus in recent releases, more GStreamer code is written in Rust for memory safety especially around decoding content.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Linux at CES 2026: Tux is alive and well in IoT, cars, and AI
Linux and open source aren't making headlines at CES 2026, but they're working behind the scenes in embedded, automotive, and edge AI.
January 6, 2026 — Source

NVIDIA Brings GeForce NOW To Linux And Fire TV With RTX 5080‑Class Cloud Gaming
It took a minute, but NVIDIA has finally answered the call to deliver a native Linux app for its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service (timely too, with recent Steam's survey data showing Linux on the rise for gaming). Same goes for select Amazon Fire TV Stick devices, both of which can tap into the service's GeForce RTX 5080-class pods to stream supported games at up to a 5K resolution and 120 frames per second, or 360 fps at 1080p.
January 6, 2026 — Source

OWASP CRS 4.22.0 and 3.3.8 released
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has released versions 4.22.0 and 3.3.8 of its Core Rule Set, which includes fixes for a serious security issue that allowed attackers to bypass security measures using different types of content. The update addresses CVE-2023-55182 and reduces false positives, allowing system admins to focus on real threats rather than harmless traffic or mistakes. Additionally, the update ensures compatibility with Rust's regex library and removes outdated code patterns and spelling variants, making maintaining the security rules easier in the long run.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Pre-Compiled Headers Being Debated For LLVM/Clang To Speed-Up Build By 1.5~2x
LLVM developers and other stakeholders have begun debating the use of pre-compiled headers "PCH" as a means of speeding up the compiulation of the LLVM compiler infrastructure by 1.5x to 2x than with non-PCH builds.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Redox OS Begins Developing Its Own Intel Graphics Driver
The Rust-written Redox OS operating system had an exciting end to the year as it began developing its own native Intel graphics driver.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Revised Steam Survey For December 2025 Puts Linux Gaming Marketshare At 3.58%
Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a 0.01% dip from November. But now the December results have been revised with a nice bump to the Linux marketshare.
January 6, 2026 — Source

The 6 Linux distros I expect to rule 2026 - and why
Which Linux distributions will rise above the competition in 2026 to dethrone the old guard? These are my picks.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Transparent Hugepage Performance On Linux 6.18 LTS: Madvise versus Always
With some Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu defaulting to "madvise" Transparent Hugepages (THP) while others like CachyOS and openSUSE defaulting to "always", you may be curious about the madvise versus always THP difference in modern Linux environments. If so this round of benchmarking is for you in looking at the performance impact of madvise versus always THP.
January 6, 2026 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 will reach its end of support on January 15, 2026
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) will reach its end of life on January 15, 2026, marking the date when no further updates or support will be available. This includes security patches, bug fixes, and other essential updates that are crucial to keeping systems secure. Users running Ubuntu 25.04 are highly recommended to upgrade to the latest supported version, Ubuntu 25.10, for continued stability and security.
January 6, 2026 — Source

WebKitGTK update for Ubuntu
A security notice (USN-7941-1) has been issued for Ubuntu and its derivatives, affecting systems including Ubuntu 25.10, 25.04, 24.04 LTS, and 22.04 LTS. Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in WebKitGTK, a library for web content, which could allow remote attackers to exploit cross-site scripting attacks, denial of service attacks, and arbitrary code execution. To fix these issues, users need to update their systems to the latest package versions, which include new upstream releases with additional bug fixes. After updating, applications that use WebKitGTK, such as Epiphany, may require a restart to apply the necessary changes.
January 6, 2026 — Source

What if Linux ran Windows... and meant it? Meet Loss32
It's crazy, a million-to-one shot, but it might just work
January 6, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 5th, 2026

AnduinOS 1.3.9, 1.1.12, and 1.4.2 released
AnduinOS has released new builds, including 1.3.9, 1.1.12, and 1.4.2, which address several issues and improve video support, audio handling, and system stability. The core changes in the latest update focus on significant shifts in these areas, with notable upgrades in video codec support and system repair processes. The new build v1.4.2 also includes security improvements by modifying the repair script to prevent potential damage risks to the initrd component and introduces an error message for server connection issues during upgrades.
January 5, 2026 — Source or Source

Apple SMC Power Driver Posted For Linux Kernel To Finally Expose Battery Stats
The newest open-source Apple Silicon driver being submitted for review in working toward its inclusion in the mainline Linux kernel is the Apple Silicon SMC power driver for being able to expose MacBook battery power metrics as well as AC power adapter status reporting under Linux.
January 5, 2026 — Source

FreeBSD versus Slackware: Which super stable OS is right for you?
One is the world's oldest Linux distro, the other isn't Linux at all. Each delivers superb stability - let's compare.
January 5, 2026 — Source

GCC 16 Lands Support For Using Picolibc
While veteran open-source developer Keith Packard is known for his X.Org Server contributions over many years, another more recent open-source creation of his is Picolibc as a C library for embedded systems. As the latest achievement on that front, merged this weekend to the GCC 16 compiler codebase is support for using Picolibc.
January 5, 2026 — Source

GNOME & Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default: "An X11'ism...Dumpster Fire"
Both the GNOME desktop and Mozilla Firefox browser projects are considering disabling middle-click-paste functionality by default.
January 5, 2026 — Source

Gnome Says No to AI-Generated Extensions
If you're a developer wanting to create a new Gnome extension, you'd best set aside that AI code generator, because the extension team will have none of that.
January 5, 2026 — Source

Intel Xe Driver Preps THP Support For "Significant" SVM Performance Gains
Intel engineer Francois Dugast today sent out the new patch series for enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support within the drm_pagemap code with a focus on the Intel Xe kernel driver usage. This enabling of THP support and in turn 2MB pages by the Xe driver is yielding "significant" performance improvements when using Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) such as for GPU compute workloads.
January 5, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel AES Library Seeing Improvements For Better Performance & More
A set of 36 patches sent out overnight is making big improvements to the Linux kernel's AES library. The patches allow for making use of the kernel's existing architecture-optimized AES code for better performance, that code is also constant-time, lower memory use, and all-around a nice improvement over the status quo.
January 5, 2026 — Source

NVIDIA Prepares Native GeForce NOW Support for Linux-Powered Operating Systems
NVIDIA is reportedly preparing to offer native support for its GeForce NOW streaming service on Linux-based operating systems. This development is significant for gamers who have had to rely on unstable workarounds on their Linux desktop PCs, which often broke after updates. With native support, GeForce NOW on Linux will enhance gaming beyond traditional hardware-based acceleration, as cloud GPUs are typically more powerful than what most gamers own.
January 5, 2026 — Source or Source

Patches Posted Seeking To Mainline Support For The Acer Swift SFA14-11 Snapdragon Laptop
Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are hoping to provide mainline support for the Acer Swift SFA14-11 laptop powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E78100 SoC.
January 5, 2026 — Source

PHP 8.3.30RC1, 8.4.17RC1 and 8.5.2RC1 Fedora/RHEL Packages released
Release Candidate versions of PHP 8.3.30RC1, 8.4.17RC1, and 8.5.2RC1 are now available for testing on Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky) systems. These versions can be installed separately as software collections (SCL), allowing users to test new features without interfering with their regular setup.
January 5, 2026 — Source

Radeon Linux Driver Patches For Next-Gen Hardware Point To New NPU Integration
Back in November AMD began posting open-source Linux graphics driver patches for some next-gen graphics IP. Those IP block patches were for MMHUB, PSP, and other blocks making up modern AMD GPUs. The GFXHUB patch pointed it to being part of the GFX12 / RDNA4 family. Out today are new patches for enabling the SMU15 IP and an interesting takeaway there is some apparent NPU integration for future Radeon graphics.
January 5, 2026 — Source

Radeon RADV Driver Lands Another Ray-Tracing Improvement: 30% Faster On RDNA2
Konstantin Seurer as one of the open-source developers working on the RADV driver for Valve has landed another ray-tracing performance optimization for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release.
January 5, 2026 — Source

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more
Remember when HP made its own CPUs and Unix? We wonder if it does
January 5, 2026 — Source

There Is No One Left On Debian's Data Protection Team
Besides Debian's aging bug tracker interface, another challenge as the Debian Linux distribution project begins 2026 is that all volunteers have left their Data Protection Team. The Debian Data Protection Team deals with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) issues and related data protection/privacy related matters.
January 5, 2026 — Source

This modern take on Xfce is the perfect distro for audio fans - here's why
Building on an already established Linux distribution, Extrox has plenty to offer to a wide range of users.
January 5, 2026 — Source

Valve & AMD Developers Delivered The Most Code Contributions To Mesa In 2025
A developer from Valve working on the RADV Vulkan driver was once again the most prolific contributor to Mesa in 2025 followed by AMD's Marek Olšák with continued improvements around RadeonSI and Gallium3D.
January 5, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 2nd, 2026

Bazzite Linux 43.20260101 released
The latest version of Bazzite Linux, version 43.20260101, has been released and brings several updates and improvements to the operating system. This release includes upgrades to core packages such as the kernel, firmware, and Mesa, as well as refreshed versions of Gamescope, Bazaar, and Ptyxis. Additionally, desktop environments Gnome and KDE have been updated with their latest versions, and Nvidia users can now access driver updates for both newer and long-term support cards.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Debian maintainer criticizes email-managed bug tracker as outdated for modern development — there is a web interface for viewing, but email remains the only way to perform critical functions
Meson creator Jussi Pakkanen says Debian's decades-old bug handling workflow is discouraging maintainers and slowing fixes.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Debian's Bug Tracker With No Web UI For Editing Bugs Is Very Obscure For 2026
Debian's maintainer of the Meson build system package is calling attention to the unfortunate state of Debian's bug tracker in 2026. Editing bug data within Debian's bug tracker still relies on writing custom-formatted emails and submitting them via your mail client. There still is no modern web UI for managing the Debian bug tracker as it was largely written in the early 90s.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Devuan 6.1.0 Excalibur released
Devuan GNU+Linux 6.1.0 Excalibur has been updated with new ISOs available from mirrors worldwide, bringing its software current with updates seen in Debian 13.2 and including several important fixes. A long-standing issue with speech synthesis has been resolved, and bugs related to the slim login manager have also been addressed. For users building an Excalibur system on Raspberry Pi or upgrading existing installs, online documentation is available to guide them through the process.
January 2, 2026 — Source

GE-Proton10-28 released
GloriousEggroll has released an update to his custom build of the Proton compatibility layer, called GE-Proton10-28. This latest version brings several notable improvements and fixes, including an updated Wine codebase, DXVK and VKD3D components, and bug fixes for various games such as World of Tanks, Blade & Soul Neo, and the Uplay overlay issue. A significant change in GE-Proton10-28 is the fix for spatial audio using Wine's ALSA driver, which allows games to work with headphones properly. The update also includes several smaller game patches and tweaks that provide more options and stability for users running games on Linux.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Goverlay 1.6.9 released
Goverlay has been updated to version 1.6.9 with several key improvements. The update primarily focuses on enhancing Flatpak compatibility by fixing issues related to runtime detection and improving overlay detection for users of MangoHud and vkBasalt. Additionally, the release includes a new configuration option for using multiple GPUs and improved handling for gpu_list settings. Proper Wayland support is also now included when using Goverlay via Flatpak in a Wayland session.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Kepler update for SUSE
openSUSE has released a security update to fix two vulnerabilities in the Kepler package on openSUSE Tumbleweed. The update, rated as moderate, addresses issues identified by CVE-2025-47911 and CVE-2025-58190. Two CVSS scores are provided for each vulnerability: one under the CVSS 3.1 scheme and another under the CVSS 4.0 scheme. The affected package is Kepler version 0.11.3-1.1, which can now be installed to resolve these security issues.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Libpcap and Seamonkey updates for Slackware
New packages are available for Slackware 15.0 and -current to fix security issues with libpcap and seamonkey. The updates include fixes for bugs and security vulnerabilities, including a bug that affected character encoding mapping from UTF-16 to UTF-8 and other issues with OOBR and OOBW in pcap_ether_aton().
January 2, 2026 — Source

Linux Addressing Out-Of-Memory Killer Inaccuracy On Large Core Count Systems
A patch is on the way to the Linux kernel and looks like it could be ready for the 6.20~7.0 kernel for addressing out-of-memory "OOM" killer inaccuracy behavior when dealing with large core count systems.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.18.3 released
The Linux Kernel version 6.18.3 has been released, representing another step forward in making the system smoother and safer. A team of dedicated developers across the globe worked together to fix various issues with the kernel, including bugs related to FUSE component reference counting and io-uring list corruption. The release also addressed device management, memory handling, zoned block devices, security features, and crypto code, resolving issues such as deadlocks, system hangs, and potential crashes.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Mesa 25.3.3 released
Mesa has released a new version, 25.3.3, which is a relatively small update due to some developers taking time off during the holidays. Despite its size, the update includes various fixes for issues reported by users and developers, covering a wide range of topics. The changes, contributed by several developers including Ahmed Hesham, Alyssa Rosenzweig, and Dylan Baker, address minor memory leaks, complex glitches in graphics rendering, and other problems.
January 2, 2026 — Source

New Linux Patches Allow More Easily Changing The Tux Kernel Boot Logo
A new patch series that was posted this week allow for users to more easily replace the default kernel boot logo. While many of us are long accustomed to seeing the picture of Tux as the kernel boot logo, for those preferring to better customize your console boot experience these patches allow it to be easily manipulated via the kernel configuration "Kconfig" options.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Net-Snmp and Smb4k security update for Debian
A security update for the net-snmp package has been released to fix a vulnerability that allows an attacker to crash the snmptrapd daemon with a specially crafted packet. The bug is not mitigatable, so the only solution is to ensure the SNMP port is firewalled or upgrade the package. A separate update also addressed a parsing issue on Linux systems 6.7 and above. Additionally, two vulnerabilities were found in the smb4k utility, allowing for local denial of service or privilege escalation, which have been fixed with an updated version of the package.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Jony Ive's first OpenAI device said to be 'audio-based'
OpenAI is intensifying its focus on audio artificial intelligence technologies, consolidating teams and overhauling its voice models to support an upcoming AI-powered personal device that emphasizes voice interaction over traditional screens.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Radeon Linux Driver Enhancements, Linux 6.19 Activity & Other December Highlights
During the month of December on Phoronix there was new and original content each and every day, ending the month with 305 original news articles and 25 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source hardware content in ending out 2025.
January 2, 2026 — Source

RadeonSI Starts 2026 With NIR Compilation Refactoring For Better Performance, Lower GLSL Compile Times
Merged on New Year's Day was a set of 36 patches authored by well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák for refactoring the NIR compilation code for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Six Years Since The Reiser5 File-System Was Announced
With the start of the New Year it now marks six years since the unexpected announcement of the Reiser5 file-system being developed as the continuation of the never-upstreamed Reiser4 file-system. But Reiser5 development never saw too much upstream interest and it's now been several years without any updated patches for Reiser5 or Reiser4.
January 2, 2026 — Source

WebkitGTK, Gh, Direwolf, USD updates for Fedora
Fedora Linux has released several security updates to ensure the operating system's stability and protection. These updates include webkitgtk for Fedora 42, gh for Fedora 43, direwolf for both Fedora 42 and 43, and usd for Fedora 43. The releases aim to address potential security vulnerabilities and keep users' systems secure.
January 2, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 1ST, 2026

Arch Linux 2026.01.01 released
Arch Linux has released new install media with kernel version 6.18.2, providing a stable foundation for computing needs. Characterized by its "Keep It Simple" philosophy, Arch Linux offers a straightforward and flexible experience through its optimized packages and community-operated repository. The distribution's community is diverse and supportive, making it an excellent resource for users seeking help or knowledge on various aspects of Arch Linux.
January 1, 2026 — Source

Golang and Delve updates for Fedora
Fedora Linux has released several security updates to enhance the system's protection and stability. The latest security patches include updates for golang-github-google-wire, delve, and golang-github-googlecloudplatform-cloudsql-proxy in Fedora 42. In addition, updates have been made available for delve and golang-github-googlecloudplatform-cloudsql-proxy in Fedora 43.
January 1, 2026 — Source

IceWM 4.0 Improves Alt-Tab Window Switcher, Alpha Blending + 32-bit RGBA Default
For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager, the project kicked off 2026 by releasing IceWM 4.0.
January 1, 2026 — Source

IceWM 4.0.0 released
IceWM 4.0.0 has been released, bringing significant enhancements to the window switching feature. The Alt+Tab interface can now handle a large number of application windows without slowing down, and it also includes a new "QuickSwitchPreview" feature that lets users peek at available applications while switching. In addition to these improvements, the release addresses several issues, including problems with keyboard layout switching and external programs updating workspace names in the taskbar. Overall, IceWM 4.0.0 improves performance on high-resolution screens, cleans up preferences, and enhances display handling across different locales and hardware setups.
January 1, 2026 — Source

Imagemagick security update for Debian 11 LTS
A security update has been released for the ImageMagick package in Debian GNU/Linux 11 (Bullseye) LTS, which is a popular image processing suite. The update fixes multiple vulnerabilities that were found in ImageMagick, including issues with memory management, integer overflows, and crashes when processing crafted TIFF files or MVG files. The fixed version of ImageMagick is 8:6.9.11.60+dfsg-1.3+deb11u8, which addresses CVEs CVE-2025-65955 to CVE-2025-69204.
January 1, 2026 — Source

KDE neon 20260101 released
KDE neon has released its latest version, offering users immediate access to new features of KDE Plasma 6.5.4 directly from Ubuntu's long-term support base. This release provides an unmodified experience of fresh KDE releases, free from proprietary driver tweaks or patches by default, making it ideal for enthusiasts who want to try out new software quickly. The distribution is designed for users willing to test upcoming KDE releases and offers a unique rolling release approach that focuses on necessary KDE packages while keeping the rest of the system stable.
January 1, 2026 — Source

Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For Dead WiFi With MediaTek MT792x Wireless
Merged to Linux Git on New Year's Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.
January 1, 2026 — Source

Manjaro Linux 26.0 Anh-Linh RC3 released
Manjaro Linux 26.0 Anh-Linh RC3 has been released, offering a fresh snapshot of the Plasma 6.5 series along with GNOME 49 and the long-awaited Cosmic release. This build includes updates to various system components, such as the Mesa driver, Vulkan SDK, and real-time Linux kernel series (6.17-rt).
January 1, 2026 — Source

More Improvements To Old AMD GPU Support On Linux Are Planned For 2026
With Linux 6.19 aging AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs switched the default kernel driver used to provide for much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using the legacy Radeon DRM kernel driver. For 2026, Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has more improvements still planned to enhance these older AMD graphics cards on Linux.
January 1, 2026 — Source

Podman update for SUSE
A security update for Podman has been released to fix a vulnerability (CVE-2025-47914) that could cause a panic due to an out-of-bounds read with non-validated message sizes. The update affects several SUSE products, including openSUSE Leap 15.3 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.2.
January 1, 2026 — Source

ReactOS Starts 2026 With Another "Major Step" Toward Windows NT6 Compatibility
The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its "open-source Windows" OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility.
January 1, 2026 — Source

SDL 3.4 Released With Many New APIs, Better Emscripten & Native PNG Support
Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications.
January 1, 2026 — Source

This new Linux desktop runs like an app on your existing desktop - and I highly recommend it
Portable and modular, Orbitiny runs on top of your existing window manager - such as KDE Plasma or GNOME - like a regular app.
January 1, 2026 — Source

Two years after launch Intel Meteor Lake offers 93% of original performance on Linux, tests show
Intel Meteor Lake on Linux: benchmarks show 93% of launch day performance two years later
January 1, 2026 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 26th, 2025

Coreboot 25.12 Released With Qualcomm X1 Plus Platform Support, AMD Turin PoC
Coreboot 25.12 is out today as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source BIOS/firmware solution.
December 26, 2025 — Source

My 11 favorite Linux distributions of all time, ranked
After using Linux for nearly 30 years, I've created a list of the best Linux distributions I've used since the beginning. Here they are.
December 26, 2025 — Source

New Linux Patches Improve exFAT Read Performance Via Multi-Cluster Mapping
For those using Microsoft's exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also having lower overhead.
December 26, 2025 — Source

New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed For Linux Akin To Microsoft Windows' "Modern Standby"
An exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list this morning is proposing a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the "Modern Standby" functionality found with Microsoft Windows.
December 26, 2025 — Source

Nova Driver Progress & Other NVIDIA Linux News From 2025
This year there was a lot of going on in the NVIDIA Linux world from their official driver stack seeing better Wayland support to a lot on the open-source scene from NVIDIA engineers contributing a lot directly to the Rust-based Nova open-source driver that continues taking shape, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver becoming more performant and capable, and a lot of other happenings. Here is a look back at the most popular NVIDIA content of 2025 on Phoronix.
December 26, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu's Rust Infatuation, New Optimizations & Other Ubuntu Linux 2025 Highlights
It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop support were among the Ubuntu highlights in 2025.
December 26, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 25th, 2025

Arch Linux kills off Nvidia Pascal GPU support — users still running GTX 10-series graphics cards will have to manually install older drivers
Nvidia Linux driver 590 axes support for GTX 10 series GPUs
December 25, 2025 — Source

Final Benchmarks Of AMDVLK versus RADV AMD Radeon Vulkan Drivers
One of the pleasant surprises this year was AMD ending the AMDVLK driver development with AMD dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver components on Linux at long last for their Radeon Software for Linux packages. This was arguably long overdue with enthusiasts and Linux gamers long preferring the RadeonSI+RADV Mesa drivers and those drivers even doing very well in recent years for workstation graphics workloads.
December 25, 2025 — Source

Google Looks To Upstream Its Propeller Tool To LLVM For More Performance
Google's Propeller is a profile-guided, reflinking optimizer for large codebases. Propeller is built atop LLVM and can allow for whole-program optimizations. Google compiler engineers are now hoping to bring the Propeller tool into the upstream LLVM codebase.
December 25, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20251225 released
KDE neon's latest release offers users immediate access to the newest KDE Plasma 6.5.4 features, solidifying its position as a platform for exploring cutting-edge software directly from Ubuntu's long-term support base.
December 25, 2025 — Source

Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus SoC Support Being Worked On For Mainline Linux Kernel
The mainline Linux kernel already supports several different Mobileye SoCs for that company focused on self-driving tech and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Consulting firm Bootlin has been working on bringing their latest SoC, the Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus, to the mainline Linux kernel.
December 25, 2025 — Source

Phoenix: A New X Server Written From Scratch With Zig
For X11/X.Org fans there is a new Christmas surprise: Phoenix as an in-development X Server written from scratch using the Zig programming language.
December 25, 2025 — Source

Ruby 4.0 Released With Ruby Box Experimental Feature, ZJIT Compiler
The past several years we have seen new releases of the Ruby programming language implementation for Christmas (25 December). This year is no different with Ruby 4.0 having been released this morning.
December 25, 2025 — Source

The Death Of Clear Linux, Other Intel Linux Engineering Setbacks In 2025
When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest.
December 25, 2025 — Source

VSCodium 1.107.18627 released
So, there's news about VSCodium: its latest version, 1.107.18627, has arrived. This update specifically tackles a problem reported by users running macOS x64 bundles who were using the arm64 version of vscodium-policy-watcher.
December 25, 2025 — Source

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software
Alternative apps to empower older versions of macOS or Windows
December 25, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 21st, 2025

AMD ISP4 Linux Driver Patches Update Again For HP ZBook Ultra G1a, Future Ryzen Laptops
One of the features that sadly didn't make it into the recent Linux 6.19 merge window was the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver for supporting the web camera found with the high-end HP ZBook Ultra G1a and also expected to be used by future flagship AMD Ryzen laptops.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Darktable 5.4 RAW Photography Software Reaches Parity Between X11 & Wayland
Darktable 5.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source RAW photography software. Besides improving camera support, UI enhancements, and more the Wayland support has been improved with Darktable. With today's Darktable 5.4 release, the Wayland support should be on par with the X11 support.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Darktable 5.4.0 released
Darktable v5.4.0 is now available as a free and open-source update for its photography workflow application. The release benefited from extensive development involving over 996 commits contributed by community members.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Intel Prepares For KVM Guest VMs To Support Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
Since Linux 6.16 the Intel APX support has been ready for the kernel infrastructure and goes along with the compiler toolchain support for Advanced Performance Extensions with the likes of GCC and LLVM/Clang. The latest element being worked on for APX enablement in the open-source/Linux world is for allowing KVM guest virtual machines (VMs) to make use of APX.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For Seagate Barracuda HDD Taking Down The SATA Bus
It's not often getting to talk about hard drives on Phoronix these days, but there's an important fix merged to the Linux 6.19 kernel today ahead of Linux 6.19-rc2. If you happen to be using a Seagate ST2000DM008 Barracuda 2TB HDD, an important fix was merged to avoid it taking down the systems' SATA bus and/or potentially other issues.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19-rc2 Adding Support For CRKD Guitar Controllers
Most notable with the input subsystem updates sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc2 release is some new hardware support. New this week is adding support for CRKD Guitars for those into musical gaming/apps.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Linux Security Roundup for Week 51, 2025
This week's roundup includes security updates from various Linux distributions to address vulnerabilities and ensure system security and stability. The updates cover multiple packages across different distributions, including AlmaLinux, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Slackware Linux, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu Linux. Specific issues addressed in the updates include identity takeover via duplicate UUID registration, denial of service, memory corruption, and arbitrary code execution in affected packages. The security patches aim to protect users from potential threats and ensure the smooth functioning of various applications on their respective operating systems.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Sparky 2025.12 Special Editions released
Sparky Linux has released new Special Edition ISO images, including GameOver, Multimedia, and Rescue, which are now available for download. These editions are based on Debian 14 testing's "Forky" branch, providing a solid foundation with up-to-date packages from both Debian and Sparky's own repositories. The new images include the latest Linux kernel 6.17, as well as recent updates to various kernels in the Sparky blurry repos, such as 6.18.2 and LTS options like 6.6.119-LTS. Users who have a rolling edition can update their installation without reinstalling everything from scratch, making it easy to keep up with the latest packages.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Ventoy 1.1.10 released
Ventoy, a popular tool for creating bootable USB drives, has been updated to version 1.1.10. The latest release includes several fixes and improvements that address common issues, such as compatibility problems with Kylin Server V11 and Windows booting in F2 mode. Additionally, Ventoy now supports musl libc environments, and the LinuxGUI component can run on Wayland setups alongside X support. Users of AerynOS also benefit from the update, which simplifies USB installs across more distributions.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Week in review: Exploited zero-day in Cisco email security appliances, Kali Linux 2025.4 released
Here's an overview of some of last week's most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos:
December 21, 2025 — Source

WMI Marshalling Support For Linux Aims To Match Windows' ACPI/WMI Handling
Open-source developer Armin Wolf has been working most recently on marshalling support for the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) platform code within the Linux kernel. This WMI marshalling support is to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows' WMI ACPI driver and ultimately to allow for better compatibility with some ACPI firmware and enhancing some WMI drivers.
December 21, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 20th, 2025

Chromium, MariaDB, LibPNG, and more updates for SUSE
Several SUSE updates have been released, including security updates and other patches. The openSUSE project has received important updates for Chromium and MariaDB, as well as critical fixes for libpng16, Xen, and MariaDB. Additionally, moderate-level updates were applied to various packages on General Availability (GA) media, including Ruby, coredns-for-k8s, rsync, and Netty. These security patches aim to address vulnerabilities and enhance system stability across the SUSE ecosystem.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Chromium, Mqttcli, Fonttools, and more updates for Fedora
Security updates have been released for Fedora Linux, specifically targeting versions 42 and 43. Several packages have received updates to enhance security, including Chromium, mqttcli, python-unicodedata2, fonttools, gosec, and uriparser. The updates cover multiple versions of Fedora Linux, with some updates shared across both versions, 42 and 43. These updates are designed to improve the security of Fedora Linux installations running these packages.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Curl, Binutils, Dracut, and more updates for Oracle Linux
Oracle has released several updates for Oracle Linux, including security patches and bug fixes. These updates affect various packages such as curl, binutils, autofs, util-linux, and pam, among others. Additionally, webkit2gtk3, a critical component of the system, has received important security updates. The list of updates covers multiple areas of Oracle Linux 8, including security and bug fixes for various packages and tools.
December 20, 2025 — Source

DragonFlyBSD's VirtIO Block Driver Lands Multi-Queue Support
For helping with the I/O performance in virtualized environments, merged this week to the DragonFlyBSD development code is multi-queue support for its VirtIO block "virtio_blk" driver.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Gemini AI Yielding Sloppy Code For Ubuntu Development With New Helper Script
A few weeks ago it was mentioned by a Canonical engineer how trying to use AI to modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker yielded some code that was "plain wrong" and other issues raised by that Microsoft GitHub Copilot code. The same Ubuntu developer shifted to trying Gemini AI to generate a helper script to assist in Ubuntu's monthly ISO snapshot releases. Google's Gemini AI also generated some sloppy code for a Python script to assist in those Ubuntu releases.
December 20, 2025 — Source

GNU Debugger 17.1 Released With CET Shadow Stack Support, New DAP Features
The GNU Debugger "GDB" 17.1 is out today with a number of new features for enhancing the open-source debugging experience.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Godot 4.6 Beta 2 released
Godot 4.6 Beta 2 has been released, which marks an important moment in the engine's development journey. The update focuses on addressing issues and improving user experience through various refinements to the editor interface and other features. Notable enhancements include fixes for shader editor window sizing and GUI-related updates like a text editor scrolling fix that works better with certain vertical screen setups. This release also includes platform-specific upgrades, such as an automatic performance boost activation for iOS projects and significant rendering updates involving motion vectors.
December 20, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.6 Finally Supporting Ambient Light Sensors, Fixing Windows Games With HDR
There are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has released security updates to address several vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. Specifically, updates have been issued for Raspberry Pi, Real-time, Oracle, and Xilinx variants of the Linux kernel.
December 20, 2025 — Source

LoongArch Promoted To Being An Official Architecture For Debian 14
Two years and a few months after LoongArch 64-bit "Loong64" was added to Debian Ports, it's now been promoted to being an official architecture for Debian Linux.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Mesa 26.0 NVK Driver Lands Improvement For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs
In addition to the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver in Mesa merging compression support for big performance wins, another performance optimization was merged earlier in the week that stand to benefit GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" graphics processors.
December 20, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.5.1, PHP 8.4.16, 8.3.29, 8.2.30, 8.1.34 Debian packages released
Ondřej Surý has released updated PHP packages for Debian GNU/Linux users, including versions from 5.6 to 8.5, addressing security issues across multiple versions. The updates fix three vulnerabilities: command injection via proc_open, CVE-2024-1874; a cookie bypass attack related to CVE-2022-31629 and patched as CVE-2024-2756; and an issue with PHP's password verification function. To add the repository to your Debian installation, you can use a provided script that installs necessary dependencies and configures the repository.
December 20, 2025 — Source

php (SSA:2025-353-01)
New packages for PHP have been released to address security issues in Slackware 15.0 and -current. The updates fix vulnerabilities in PDO quoting, array_merge(), and getimagesize(). Users can find the updated packages at various mirror sites, including ftp.slackware.com and osuosl.org. To install the new package, users should upgrade as root and then restart Apache httpd.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Podman, Python, LibSSH, and more updates for Rocky Linux
Several updates are available for various packages on Rocky Linux 8 and 9, including podman, python, libssh, binutils, webkit2gtk3, skopeo, php, container-tools, curl, and others.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Roundcube, Dropbear, MediaWiki updates for Debian
There are multiple security updates for Debian GNU/Linux distributions, including Roundcube, Dropbear, and MediaWiki. The Roundcube update, which is available for Debian 10 ELTS, 12, and 13, fixes two vulnerabilities: an information disclosure vulnerability in its HTML style sanitizer and a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability via SVG's animate tag. The dropbear update for Debian 12 and 13 addresses a privilege escalation issue caused by incorrect permission handling in the Dropbear SSH server.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Ungoogled Chromium 143.0.7499.169-1 released
A new version of Ungoogled Chromium has arrived, offering an alternative to standard browser releases by dialing back on Google integration.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Wine 11.0 Release Candidate 3 released
There's a new release candidate out for Wine 11.0, which is now available for download from WineHQ. It marks the third release candidate ahead of this upcoming major point update, Wine 11.0. This specific milestone prioritizes bug fixes over the introduction of new features. With code freeze effectively in place, the main goal here is to resolve various issues reported by users trying out the software.
December 20, 2025 — Source

You can force FSR 4 Redstone to work on RDNA 3 GPUs with new workaround for Linux systems — solution requires Proton compatibility to work properly
This mod proving that FSR4 Redstone works with RDNA 3 has got some gamers up in arms with AMD's limitation.
December 20, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 19th, 2025

2025 Brought "Transformative Changes" For FreeBSD On Laptops
As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it's been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought "transformative changes" for the FreeBSD laptop experience.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Cloud Hypervisor 50 Released With QCOW2 Compression, Performance Improvements
Cloud Hypervisor 50.0 is out today for this cloud-minded, security-focused and Rust-based hypervisor. Cloud Hypervsior began as an open-source Intel project while in more recent times has shifted to being largely maintained by Microsoft, Crusoe, Cyberus Tech, Rivos, and others.
December 19, 2025 — Source

FUSE 3.18 Released With FUSE-Over-IO-uring, Statx Support
Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously referred to file-systems in user-space as for toys and misguided people. But FUSE has shown a lot of interesting use-cases over the years and has grown more capable in the decade since Torvalds' prior comments. Out today is FUSE 3.18 as the latest release for the FUSE library.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Kubernetes 101: Understanding the Foundation and Getting Started
Learn when Kubernetes truly solves your problems versus when it adds unnecessary complexity — and get hands-on with both local and production cluster setup.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Intel Readies Nova Lake Display Support For Linux 6.20~7.0
For the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel the initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support was merged for the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake processors. There were some initial Xe3P_LPD display patches also merged for Linux 6.19 but it looks like for Linux 6.20 (or what may end up being known as Linux 7.0), the display support will actually be functional for driving monitors from Nova Lake.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Intel's Linux NPU User-Space Driver Adds Panther Lake Support
Since late 2024 Intel has been working on 5th Gen NPU support for their Linux IVPU driver. That 5th Gen NPU support for Intel Core Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs was upstreamed back in Linux 6.13. Now today the Intel Linux NPU user-space driver has seen its official support added for Panther Lake.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.12 To Linux 6.18 LTS Upgrade Offers Worthwhile Benefits For 5th Gen AMD EPYC
The recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is this year's Long Term Support version. As such it's sure to a see a lot of enterprise and hyperscaler uptake in being the annual LTS kernel version. While Linux 6.12 LTS will be maintained at least through the end of next year, upgrading to Linux 6.18 LTS can be very worthwhile from the performance perspective beyond the extended timeline until it will reach end-of-life.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Linux NPU Driver v1.28.0 released
Intel has released a new version of its Linux driver for Neural Processing Units (NPUs), bringing the software to 1.28.0. This update primarily affects users with Intel Core Ultra CPUs, such as Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake, which now feature improved support thanks to their built-in NPUs. The new driver has been verified on various platforms, including Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Panther Lake, making it easier for users with these devices to get up and running. Support for Ubuntu 22.04 has been discontinued, but the driver is now compatible with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and other systems.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Linux Preps For "Slow Workload Hints" With Intel Panther Lake
Five years ago Intel began introducing "workload hints" used for thermal and power purposes with their SoCs and in turn on the software-side being enabled with their INT340X kernel driver on Linux systems. That Intel workload hint coverage was added to the Linux kernel in late 2020 and then a big addition in 2023 with Meteor Lake introducing new workload hint type capabilities.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Mageia 10 Planning For April Release While Still Maintaining 32-bit Support
The Mageia development team recently met to solidify their plans for releasing Mageia 10 as the next major release of this LInux distribution with its roots that trace back to the days of Mandrake Linux.
December 19, 2025 — Source

ML4W Dotfiles for Hyprland 2.9.9.4 released
The ML4W Dotfiles team has released a new update, version 2.9.9.4, for Hyprland users, which includes several tweaks and additions to enhance efficiency on Linux desktops. The update introduces global theme support, allowing users to easily switch between themes using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT+T. Additionally, animation smoothness has been improved by managing this setting directly through the Settings app, and the default cursor has been refreshed with new options.
December 19, 2025 — Source

pearOS is a Linux that falls rather close to the Apple tree
Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheen
December 19, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Plans Confirmed For Linux 6.20 / Linux 7.0
Canonical confirmed their Linux kernel plans today for the Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release due out in April.
December 19, 2025 — Source or Source

Wine 11.0-rc3 Released With Another Week Of Bug Fixing
In working toward the Wine 11.0 stable release in January, Wine 11.0-rc3 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Xorgproto 2025.1 Released To Recognize Newer Keyboard Keys
For X.Org Server users there is a new release of xorgproto for the holidays. Xorgproto as the set of headers and specifications for the X11 core protocols and extensions is out with its first new release since March 2024.
December 19, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 15th, 2025

AmpereOne M Finally Appears - In The Oracle Cloud With A4
Back in July 2024, Ampere Computing announced AmpereOne M on their road-map for Q4'2024 to provide AmpereOne with 12 channel DDR5 memory compared to eight memory channels with the original AmpereOne processors. Then this past May the AmpereOne M SKUs were announced while Ampere Computing stated these "M" processors had been shipping since Q4 of last year. Since then we haven't seen or heard anything more about AmpereOne M nor the AmpereOne MX processors with up to 256 cores. Since then, the acquisition of Ampere Computing by SoftBank also was completed that made us wonder more about impacts to the roadmap and what hardware may or may not make it out to market.
December 15, 2025 — Source

As Meta fades in open-source AI, Nvidia senses its chance to lead
Nvidia emphasizes greater transparency in its Nemotron 3 models, especially with respect to training data that enterprises care about.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Fedora 44 Could Work Nicely "Out Of The Box" On Snapdragon-Powered Windows ARM Laptops
Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Flatpak Adds Support For Building OCI Bundles Using Zstd Compressed Layers
Back in November Flatpak 1.17 released with support for sideloading from OCI images and other improvements in working toward the Flatpak 1.18 stable release. Out today is Flatpak 1.17.1 and was then followed quickly by Flatpak 1.17.2 to fix a mistake in the release artifacts.
December 15, 2025 — Source

GCC Developers Considering Whether To Accept AI/LLM-Generated Patches
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack.
December 15, 2025 — Source

GIMP 3.2-RC2 Brings Bug Fixes & Minor Refinements
GIMP 3.2-RC2 is out today as what could be the last release candidate of GIMP 3.2 before its stable release. This leading open-source image editor/creation alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop continues becoming much more refined and polished in the GIMP 3 series.
December 15, 2025 — Source

GNOME bans AI-generated extensions
A glut of extensions from programmers who don't understand their AI-written code has delayed reviews.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Igalia's Work Improving The Linux Kernel For Helping Steam Play Gaming On ARM64
Besides Valve funding FEX-Emu for x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux as part of their Steam Play (Proton) efforts in being able to get Windows x86/x64 games running on AArch64 SteamOS for the Snapdragon-powered Steam Frame, there is also work happening in kernel-space to help this emulated gaming experience on AArch64.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Intel Quietly Discontinues Its Open-Source User-Space Gaudi Driver Code
There's another setback to the open-source driver code around Intel's Gaudi accelerator support on Linux.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Kali Linux 2025.4: New tools and "quality-of-life" improvements
OffSec has released Kali Linux 2025.4, a new version of its widely used penetration testing and digital forensics platform.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Kernel Graphics Driver Changes Already Begin Lining Up For Linux 6.20~7.0
Even before the Linux 6.19 merge window wrapped up this weekend with the Linux 6.19-rc1 release, there was already the first pull request to DRM-Next of the first batch of new material to be queued for Linux 6.19's successor.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Features: LUO, PCIe Link Encryption, ASUS Armoury, DRM Color Pipeline API & More
With Linux 6.19-rc1 released, the merge window for Linux 6.19 has now concluded. Here is a summary of the interesting Linux 6.19 new features and changes with this kernel version.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Manjaro Linux 25.1 Anh-Linh Preview 2 released
Manjaro Linux 25.1 Anh-Linh Preview 2 has been released, featuring an updated Plasma desktop environment with version 6.5 and GNOME 49 as an alternative option. The release also includes updates to graphics performance, with the Mesa driver at version 25.3.1 and Vulkan SDK at 1.4.328.1. Various applications have received updates, including Firefox, Thunderbird, and LXQt, while the system stack has been refreshed with a new real-time Linux kernel series (6.17-rt).
December 15, 2025 — Source

OpenSnitch 1.8.0 released
OpenSnitch 1.8.0 has been released, bringing significant changes, including a GUI overhaul built on PyQt6 instead of PyQt5. This update reflects the shift away from PyQt5 by many GNU/Linux distributions and aims to keep OpenSnitch modern going forward, although it may no longer be compatible with older distros like Linux Mint 21.2 or Ubuntu 22.04. The new version includes several substantial enhancements, such as streamlined firewall rule management, improved backend upgrades, and task automation features.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Roundcube 1.7 RC2 released
Roundcube has released its second release candidate for version 1.7, focusing on resolving serious issues discovered since the first release candidate dropped. Two security problems were addressed: a cross-site scripting vulnerability and an update to prevent information disclosure, both thanks to contributions from outside developers. For Postgres users, the developer fixed a long-standing syntax error in database migration scripts, a significant step towards making 1.7 ready for prime time.
December 15, 2025 — Source

SparkyLinux 2025.12 released
The latest version of SparkyLinux, "Tiamat," has been released in the semi-rolling line with updated ISO images available for download. This release includes kernel updates up to version 6.17.11 and other variants, as well as updated versions of Firefox (Extended Support Release) and Thunderbird. Users installing on UEFI systems may need an internet connection due to improvements made to the Calamares installer, while those with BIOS and 64-bit support can still use the CLI option. The new release also features two additional package mirror servers and multiple installation options, including six different desktop environments.
December 15, 2025 — Source

System76 Launches Pop!_OS Linux Distro To Much Fanfare, Check It Out
Pop!_OS is a new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution from System76, flaunting the COSMIC Desktop Environment and available on either a PC of your choice or one of many US-made laptops or desktops. While the naming of Pop!_OS recalls a more distant era of computing, the operating system itself is quite modern, featuring all the core features you've come to expect from Windows plus some enticing additions.
December 15, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

The latest Pop!_OS 24.04 update has this longtime Linux user more excited than ever
As a Pop!_OS veteran, I've not been this excited about a release since I first started using System76's in-house distribution.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Torvalds On Linux Security Modules: "I Already Think We Have Too Many Of Those Pointless Things"
Stemming from a security researcher and his team proposing a new Linux Security Module (LSM) three years ago and it not being accepted to the mainline kernel, he raised issue over the lack of review/action to Linus Torvalds and the mailing lists. In particular, seeking more guidance for how new LSMs should be introduced and raised the possibility of taking the issue to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB).
December 15, 2025 — Source

Wayland Protocols 1.47 Released With Updated Color Management Protocol
Following the Color Management protocol introduced in Wayland Protocols 1.41, out today is Wayland Protocols 1.47 with various revisions to that color management and HDR support.
December 15, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 12th, 2025

AI is already part of Linux's plumbing - whether developers like it or not
AI is quietly doing some of Linux's dirtiest work, but not everyone is comfortable with it.
December 12, 2025 — Source

AMD ROCm 7.10 Released - Strix Point APUs Now Officially Supported
Sure enough, yesterday's inaugural TheRock 7.10 release tag ended up being a precursor to ROCm 7.10 as predicted in the earlier article. Overnight ROCm 7.10 was released as a new developer preview and with it comes expanded hardware support -- including for Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point APUs finally being officially mentioned.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Bazzite 43.20251210 released
A new version of Bazzite Linux, version 43.20251210, has been released with improvements for gamers and streamers, including built-in HDR support and new CPU schedulers to reduce lag during games. The operating system comes with Steam pre-installed, making it easy to access your game collection, and includes user-contributed tools to make game launches faster and more tailored to gaming and streaming needs. Bazzite 43 also features integration with Lutris, a game launcher that can pull games from multiple sources beyond Steam, keeping them separate and clean during Steam sessions.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Blender Working On KosmicKrisp Support For Vulkan On macOS
The Blender 3D modeling software could enjoy better macOS support with better cross-platform code paths thanks to in-development work for leveraging KosmicKrisp for Vulkan API usage on macOS via Metal.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Bye, Windows: Which Linux distribution is right for you?
There are many reasons to switch to Linux, such as security, free software, and data protection. We compare the distributions.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Cache Aware Scheduling Raises Performance For Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids
The October round of Cache Aware Scheduling tests were done on a dual AMD EPYC 9965 server and showed nice results in a variety of workloads from this proposed kernel code. Thanks to Giga Computing having sent over the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 barebones server a while back to address my failed Granite Rapids AP reference server platform, I am now able to run some Cache Aware Scheduling benchmarks with the Xeon 6900P series processors.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Kali Linux 2025.4 released
Kali Linux 2025.4 has been released with several notable changes, focusing on the three main desktop environments: GNOME, KDE Plasma, and Xfce. The update brings modern features such as Wayland as the default window server, an improved app grid, fuzzy search in KRunner, and color theme support to Xfce. In addition to these updates, Kali Linux 2025.4 also includes new tools like bpf-linker, evil-winrm-py, and Hexstrike-AI; package updates with a kernel upgrade to 6.16; and expanded support for Android devices through Kali NetHunter.
December 12, 2025 — Source or Source

Linux 6.19 Improves User-Space I/O "UIO" With Shared Virtual Addressing
Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window were all of the "char/misc" updates. A lot of random changes throughout this time from the Industrial I/O "IIO" drivers to an interesting new feature for User-Space I/O "UIO" for PCI/PCIe devices.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Lands x2AVIC Patches For AMD SVM Handling Up To 4096 vCPUs
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" updates for Linux 6.19 include preparations by AMD for handling up to a possible 4,096 virtual CPUs for VMs.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Linux Patches Fix eMMC Secure Erase Of 1GB Taking ~10 Minutes To Now Just 2 Seconds
A new patch series from an NXP engineer optimizes the secure erase performance for certain Kingston eMMC devices. Currently with the Linux kernel performing a secure erase on 1GB of data can take around ten minutes. With these new patches that 1GB secure erase can be done in around two seconds.
December 12, 2025 — Source

New Patches Lay Out Linux Kernel Adjustments For RISC-V RVA23 Hardware
With the first of RISC-V RVA23-compatible hardware expected to be released in 2026, we are beginning to see more Linux developers prepare for this RVA23 profile and the now-mandated extensions. Sent out this week was an initial "request for comments" patch series on RVA23 adjustments for the Linux kernel.
December 12, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver 580.119.02 released
NVIDIA has released a new Linux x64 Display Driver, version 580.119.02, which addresses several issues from earlier versions. A particularly annoying bug that caused visual distortions on LG Ultragear monitors in specific modes is now fixed, and workstation GPUs with X-Plane are also no longer affected by a long-standing problem. The driver reverts changes made in previous versions that resulted in missing display options for certain resolutions and fixes user-reported issues with specific monitors causing display mode problems.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Parents call for New York governor to sign landmark AI safety bill
They called it "minimalist guardrails" that should set a standard.
December 12, 2025 — Source

ReBAR Code Cleaned Up For Linux 6.19 Along With A Few New PCIe Controller Drivers
All of the PCI subsystem updates were merged last week for the nearly-over Linux 6.19 merge window. Standing out this cycle are Resizable BAR improvements as well as introducing a few new PCIe controller drivers.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Rebellions and Red Hat Introduce Red Hat OpenShift AI Powered by Rebellions NPUs
Rebellions and Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat OpenShift AI powered by Rebellions neural processing units (NPUs), integrating Red Hat's scalable, flexible and open source AI inference capabilities with Rebellions' energy-efficient NPUs to deliver a validated full-stack enterprise AI platform. This collaboration fully supports Red Hat's goal to deliver "any model, any accelerator, any cloud" to customers globally by enabling more choice and optionality in the architectures underpinning AI workloads.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Roundcube 1.7 RC released
The Roundcube development team has released a candidate build for Roundcube 1.7, featuring substantial changes and fixes over beta2. New additions include better CSV import support, a markdown editor plugin for composing messages, and improved security through the default 'noopener' attribute settings on links opening in new tabs. However, there are breaking changes that users should know when upgrading, including the removal of the contact_search_name setting and changes to user session timeouts.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.23.4 released
The latest stable release of the Samba 4.23 series has been announced, bringing new fixes and enhancements to this widely used open-source file and print sharing system. This update addresses several issues related to sharing files and folders, including problems with Time Machine backups, the mdssvc service, winbind cache consistency, and a function called vfswrap_openat that could cause issues when handling directories. The samba-bgqd daemon's man page has also been updated alongside other changes in the release.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Synergizing Intelligence and Orchestration: Transforming Cloud Deployments with AI and Kubernetes
Leverage AI's predictive analytics and automation with Kubernetes autoscaling and self‑healing to transform cloud deployments more efficiently.
December 12, 2025 — This Company Thinks It Can Power AI Data Centers With Supersonic Jet Engines
The same tech that could bring back supersonic aircraft may also let data centers continue to operate at scale.
December 12, 2025 — Source

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Ubuntu Studio 26.04 May Modernize Its Desktop Layout
Ubuntu Studio is the variant of Ubuntu Linux focused on content creation and audio recording needs, video editing, and other creative workloads. Ubuntu Studio's desktop hasn't seen too many changes since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS some 13+ years ago. But Ubuntu Studio developers are now considering desktop layout changes to help modernize its appearance.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.336 Released With NVIDIA Compute Occupancy Priority Extension
Vulkan 1.4.336 is out today as the first spec update in two weeks for this high performance graphics and compute API.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Ventoy 1.1.09 released
Ventoy, a popular bootable USB drive utility, has been updated to version 1.1.09 with several key improvements and new features. A frustrating bug that prevented openSUSE users from booting has been fixed, making it smoother for affected users. The update also includes experimental support for the Btrfs file system, but with limitations: it only works in non-RAID setups and doesn't support compressing ISO files made for btrfs. Additionally, several other bugs were addressed, including an issue affecting persistence plugins for Arch Linux users and problems related to the web interface for managing VentoyPlugsons.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.17.13b released
Zen Browser 1.17.13b has been released with several security updates and notable feature additions. The main focus of this release was on addressing high-impact bugs, including fixes for CVE-2025-14321 and CVE-2025-14322, which resolved use-after-free issues in WebRTC Signaling and sandbox escape problems in the Graphics CanvasWebGL part. Additionally, the developers plugged up other security holes, such as JIT miscompilations and same-origin policy bypasses. The update also brings feature additions like support for fractional scaled displays on Linux Wayland, a dedicated GPU process on MacOS, and improved theme customization options.
December 12, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 11th, 2025

D7VK 1.0 Released For "Production Ready" Direct3D 7 On Vulkan
The D7VK project recently started as the Direct3D 7 API implemented atop the Vulkan API akin to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton with newer versions of Microsoft Direct3D. Today marks the D7VK 1.0 release for this project in now declaring itself "production ready" for Linux gamers.
December 11, 2025 — Source

dtSearch Adds Linux ARM64 Build and Boosts JSON/CSV Support in 2025.02 Release
dtSearch has released version 2025.02 of its enterprise and developer product line, expanding platform coverage and strengthening support for modern data formats used in large-scale applications. The update targets organizations and developers who need to instantly search terabytes of text across mixed on-premises and cloud environments.
December 11, 2025 — Source

Qualcomm Acquires RISC-V Specialists At Ventana Microsystems
An acquisition announcement that flew under the radar yesterday but then I only noticed today with a GCC MAINTAINERS file update, "with the acquisition of Ventana Microsystems by Qualcomm..." Qualcomm has acquired Ventana as a RISC-V high performance CPU start-up.
December 11, 2025 — Source

Rust 1.92.0 released
Rust has released its latest stable version, 1.92.0, which can be updated using the command $ rustup update stable for users already set up with rustup. Alternatively, those without rustup can download it from the official website along with full release notes. One key change in this version is the introduction of deny-by-default never type lints, intended to ensure future compatibility and prevent code patterns that may cause issues once "never" types become stable.
December 11, 2025 — Source

System76 Launches Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS With COSMIC Desktop
Back in October System76 announced a planned release date for Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the COSMIC Desktop... And they've made it! The new Pop!_OS 24.04 is now available for download as the long-awaited update atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while using their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment.
December 11, 2025 — Source

Tails 7.3.1 released
Tails 7.3.1 has been released to the public, representing a minor update that addresses a security vulnerability discovered in one of its software libraries. This version includes several key upgrades focused on improving overall security, stability, and usability for users, including updates to Thunderbird and the Tor Browser. Additionally, there have been significant improvements to how Tails handles releases itself, including adjustments for custom about:tor patches and enhancements to the test suite.
December 11, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 2 Released As Latest Monthly ISOs
It was just at the end of month that Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 1 ISOs were published for the first "Resolute Raccoon" milestone. Out already is now Snapshot 2 with Canonical releasing these images ahead of their engineers having time off for end-of-year holidays.
December 11, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 5th, 2025

AMD EPYC 7773X "Milan-X" Performance & Power Nearly Four Years Later
Nearly four years have passed since AMD launched their EPYC Milan-X processors with 3D V-Cache. When recently rearranging some servers in the lab and realizing the four year anniversary was coming up in March, curiosity got the best of me in wondering where the Linux performance and energy efficiency on Milan-X is now with the latest Linux software stack compared to the numbers when Milan-X launched back in March 2022.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Fedora versus Arch Linux: How to choose your next Linux distro (and which one I use)
If you're trying to decide between two powerhouse Linux distributions, let's see if I can help you make the call.
December 5, 2025 — Source

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built
Project retires 32-bit ports, embraces pkgbase, and modernizes build process
December 5, 2025 — Source

Intel Graphics Score A Big Win With Linux 6.19: Color Management & Xe VFIO Driver Merged
On top of enabling Xe3P graphics for Nova Lake and Crescent Island plus other changes like CASF adaptive sharpening for Lunar Lake and newer, another set of Intel kernel graphics driver updates were merged overnight as a big win for the open-source Intel graphics stack on Linux.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Intel Nova Lake Audio Support Merged For Linux 6.19
The sound subsystem updates were merged on Thursday for enabling a variety of new audio hardware with the Linux 6.19. Among the hardware standing out is getting Intel Nova Lake audio support in order.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Intel Updates Cache Aware Scheduling For Linux With Better NUMA Balancing
Intel engineer Tim Chen has sent out a second version of the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling patches for the Linux kernel to enhance the CPU performance of modern processors sporting multiple cache domains.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Jolla Trying Again To Develop A New Sailfish OS Linux Smartphone
Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices. But now it seems they are trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 crowned LTS kernel -- and Alpine 3.23 wastes no time adopting it
Umpteen other distros just put out new versions, but this one is our favorite
December 5, 2025 — Source

Linux founder Linus Torvalds defends Windows' Blue Screens of Death
Linus Torvalds believes that Windows doesn't deserve jokes about the Blue Screen of Death. He argues that the reasons for the infamous BSOD often don't lie with Microsoft.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Linux NTFS3 Driver Will Now Support Timestamps Prior To 1970
While NTFSPLUS continues to be developed as a new and modern NTFS open-source driver for Linux systems, at the moment NTFS3 from Paragon Software remains the most capable NTFS file-system driver within the mainline kernel. For the Linux 6.19 merge window a variety of fixes have landed for this driver.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Linux Still Dealing With Quirky Firewire Devices As We Enter 2026
For Linux 6.19 as what will be the first stable kernel release of 2026, the IEEE-1394 Firewire stack continues dealing with device quirks and improving support for different Firewire-connected devices. In 2026 is also when the Linux Firewire maintainer plans to begin recommending users migrate away from the IEEE-1394 bus followed by closing the Linux Firewire efforts in 2029.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Next ChatGPT upgrade imminent following 'code red' declaration
Earlier this week, it was reported that OpenAI was in a bit of a tizzy over the current state of Google's Gemini generative AI model. A so-called "code red" declaration was made, which will reportedly result in the next upgrade to ChatGPT arriving sooner than expected.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits he doesn't know if AI will eventually destroy humanity
Huang also praised Trump's handling of the US economy
December 5, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Improves Block Layer Peer-To-Peer DMA In Linux 6.19
The IO_uring and block subsystem changes have been merged for the Linux 6.19 merge window with a few improvements worth highlighting this cycle.
December 5, 2025 — Source

OpenAI strikes deal on US$4.6 bn AI center in Australia
ChatGPT maker OpenAI and an Australian data center operator have agreed to develop a multibillion-dollar AI center in Sydney.
December 5, 2025 — Source

OpenAI's Code Red Strategy Explained: Plan to Make ChatGPT Faster, Steadier & Clearer
What happens when a tech giant sounds the alarm? OpenAI's recent declaration of a "Code Red" has sent ripples through the artificial intelligence industry, signaling a moment of intense urgency and recalibration. Once the undisputed leader in conversational AI, OpenAI now faces mounting pressure from rivals like Google and Anthropic, whose advancements threaten to outpace its flagship product, ChatGPT. Simultaneously, internal hurdles, ranging from talent attrition to soaring operational costs, have compounded the company's challenges. This bold move by OpenAI isn't just a response to competition; it's a high-stakes bid to redefine its future in a rapidly evolving landscape.
December 5, 2025 — Source

OpenAI's GPT-5.2 'code red' response to Google is coming next week
OpenAI's Gemini 3 response is coming sooner than expected.
December 5, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.29RC1, 8.4.16RC1, and 8.5.1RC1 Fedora/RHEL Packages released
PHP developer Remi Collet has just released three new Release Candidate versions for testing: PHP 8.3.29RC1, 8.4.16RC1, and the highly anticipated 8.5.1RC.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Tuxedo unveils Gemini 17 Gen4 Linux laptop for high performance workloads
Tuxedo Computers has launched its latest Linux laptop, the Gemini 17 Gen4. The new 17.3 inch notebook is designed as as a desktop replacement and combines an Intel Core i9 processor, Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti graphics and a 2560 x 1440 240Hz display. It's aimed at users who want workstation performance in a portable form.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Wine 11.0-rc1 Released With TWAINDSM 64-bit Module For Scanners
As anticipated the first release candidate of Wine 11.0 is now available in working toward the annual stable release in January.
December 5, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 3rd, 2025

Alpine Linux 3.23 Released With APK Tools v3 For Package Management
Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses.
December 3, 2025 — Source

elementary OS versus Ubuntu Budgie: Two beautiful Linux distros, but which is right for you?
These Linux distros are as elegant as they are user-friendly. Here's how to decide between them.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Fedora 44 Cleared To Replace Kernel Console With User-Space KMSCON
A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Intel's Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Delivered Significant Improvements In 2025
Last week I provided a look at how Intel's GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today's article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series "Alchemist" and B-Series "Battlemage" look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year... Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support continues moving in the right direction too.
December 3, 2025 — Source

LibreOffice 26.2 Alpha 1 Released For Testing
The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 arrives as the year's final drop and likely next LTS
The last new kernel release of 2025 is here, and it's looking likely this will be the new LTS kernel release.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
Not exactly a big surprise but the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is now officially promoted to being this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Linux usage hits an all-time high in Steam Hardware Survey—and AMD processors continue their march against Intel
Windows 11 seems to be good at making enemies.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions & Configurable Hibernation Threads For Linux 6.19
The pull requests landing the power management subsystem updates for Linux 6.19 along with the ACPI and thermal control code have landed. There is new hardware support, Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support, and other new features for Linux power management in this new kernel.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Microsoft finds an unlikely ally — Linux developer defends Windows against BSoD jokes
It turns out unreliable hardware might have more to do with your Windows BSoD errors than software bugs.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Sam Altman orders "code red" for ChatGPT as rival AI models catch up
Under pressure from Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude
December 3, 2025 — Source

Scoped User Access In Linux 6.19 To Reduce Speculation Barriers & Its Performance Hit
Merged yesterday to the Linux 6.19 Git codebase was the "core/uaccess" pull that introduces new scoped user-mode access with auto-cleanup functionality. This can reduce the number of speculation barriers encountered when needing to access user-mode memory and thereby avoiding some of the performance penalties incurred by speculation barriers.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Sound Open Firmware 2.14 Released With Intel Wildcat Lake & Nova Lake Support
Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella.
December 3, 2025 — Source

X.Org Server's xkbcomp Updated For Four Security Issues Dating Back Years
Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.
December 3, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 30th, 2025

Bazzite Gaming OS 43.20251127
Bazzite makes gaming and everyday use smoother and simpler across desktop PCs, handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Black Sesame SoC Support To Be Merged For Linux 6.19
A new SoC vendor and in turn new SoC/platform support is set to premiere in the Linux 6.19 kernel with the initial Black Sesame Technologies C1200 support.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Broadcom "BNG_RE" Next-Generation RoCE Driver Slated For Linux 6.19
Queued up via the Linux kernel's RDMA development Git tree is "BNG_RE" as the next-generation RoCE driver from Broadcom.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Features Expected For Linux 6.19: ASUS Armoury, Many Intel Bits, AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 Enhanced
With the Linux 6.18 kernel likely being released later today, here is a look at some of the features on the table for the next kernel cycle, Linux 6.19. The list is based on changes queued in various "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window. There's always the possibility of last minute change of plans or objections raised by Linus Torvalds, but this should provide an early look at some of the features more than likely to be merged for Linux 6.19.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Genode OS Framework 25.11 Adds Intel Alder Lake Graphics Support
The Genode OS Framework 25.11 release was issued this weekend as the newest update to this original open-source operating system effort built around a micro-kernel design and various novel design approaches.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Helm Improves Kubernetes Package Management with Biggest Release in 6 Years
Helm, the Kubernetes application package manager, has officially reached version 4.0.0. Helm 4 is the first major upgrade in six years, and also marks Helm's 10th anniversary under the guidance of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The update aims to address several challenges around scalability, security, and developer workflow.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Released With Many New Features, Likely This Year's LTS Kernel
Linux 6.18 stable is now available! Linux 6.18 ushers in many new features and changes while also is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel version.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Will Allow You To Write I2C Drivers In Rust
With the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle there are yet more Rust kernel bindings being introduced and other additions to make it possible to write more Linux kernel drivers within the Rust programming language. Among the new Rust additions expected for Linux 6.19 are making it possible to write Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) bus drivers in Rust.
November 30, 2025 — Source

NixOS 25.11 Released With 7,002 New Packages Added
It's been an exciting weekend for Linux distribution released with new versions of Endeavour OS, CachyOS, Solus and now a new NixOS release.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Sylve Maturing As A FreeBSD Unified Web Management Interface
Ahead of the FreeBSD 15.0 stable release expected to be announced next week, the FreeBSD project today published their Q3-2025 status report to outline their various development accomplishments from July through September.
November 30, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 29th, 2025

Arch Linux Based Endeavour OS Updated After ISO Refresh Hiatus
Endeavour OS is one of the popular desktop Linux distributions built around Arch Linux providing a nice out-of-the-box experience. Since their last ISO refresh back in March there hadn't been much news from the project nor any new ISO releases for this rolling-release distro. But thankfully today they are back in the saddle with a new ISO release, Endeavour OS 2025.11.24 "Ganymede".
November 29, 2025 — Source

CachyOS Improves Intel Video Acceleration Experience
In addition to the release today of a big refresh to Endeavour OS, CachyOS is out with their latest ISO refresh for this additional Arch Linux powered desktop OS. CachyOS for its November 2025 refresh brings installer improvements, now installs additional packages for media acceleration when capable Intel graphics are detected, handling for Bcachefs with its DKMS module, and other improvements.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Docker Releases Desktop 4.50, Adds Free Debugging Tools and AI-Native Enhancements
Docker recently announced the release of Docker Desktop 4.50, marking another update for developers seeking faster, more secure workflows and expanded AI-integration capabilities. The release introduces a free version of Docker Debug for all users, deeper IDE integration (including VSCode and Cursor), improved multi-service to Kubernetes conversion support, new enterprise-grade governance controls, and early support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) tooling.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Framework Computer Now Sponsoring LVFS / Fwupd Development
With the Linux Vendor Firmware Service serving more than 135 million downloads for Linux users updating their system and device firmware, LVFS has been working to get more hardware vendors to contribute either engineering resources or directly contributing annual dues as sponsors. Framework Computer is now the first one to have executed an agreement under these new sponsorship efforts.
November 29, 2025 — Source

GNOME Gains New Clipboard Manager Option With "Copyous"
For those looking to improve their clipboard management experience on the GNOME desktop, Copyous is a new GNOME Shell extension serving as a new clipboard manager.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Intel Hiring Two More Experienced Linux Kernel Engineers
While there have been a number of Intel Linux engineers laid off over roughly the past year, other Linux kernel engineers opting to pursue employment opportunities elsewhere amid the ongoing challenges and restructuring at the company, and shifts in their open-source strategy, there's some good news as we work toward the 2025 holidays. Intel is currently hiring for two more experienced Linux kernel software engineers.
November 29, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.6's KWin Implements RandR Emulation For Better XWayland Experience
KDE developers have been busy ending out the month of November with a number of new features and fixes queued up for next year's Plasma 6.6 desktop release.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Kubernetes Community Retires Popular Ingress NGINX Controller
The Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee has announced the retirement of Ingress NGINX, one of the most widely deployed ingress controllers in the ecosystem. Best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026, after which there will be no further releases, bug fixes, or security updates, according to an announcement made at Kubecon NA 2025.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Niri 25.11 Rust-Written Wayland Compositor Adds Alt-Tab Switcher, New Animations
Niri 25.11 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust-written, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Solus Linux 4.8 Released With Python 2 Finally Removed, Abandons Solus Software Center
In addition to the releases today of updated Endeavour OS and CachyOS, Solus 4.8 is out as the latest version of another desktop Linux distribution popular with enthusiasts.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Wine Staging 10.20 released
The latest version of Wine Staging, 10.20, has been released with a range of updates that are being tested and refined before entering the main development branch. This version serves as a testing ground where users can try out new ideas in collaboration with developers, allowing for real-time feedback and better results. The release includes a rebase against Wine 10.20 and updated graphics technologies, specifically the vkd3d-latest patchset, which is advancing innovative solutions within the ecosystem.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.17.11B released
Zen Browser has released an update to version 1.17.11b with several enhancements. The update fixes common issues for Windows users, including opening a tab from the sidebar now requiring only one click and entering fullscreen mode on multi-monitor setups no longer displaying a brief border. Additionally, the browser's performance has been improved by fixing page load hiccups caused by HTTP/3 connection failures, resulting in faster load times when encountering this issue. For Mac users with pinned tabs, the update addresses issues where certain pins wouldn't restore after quitting or relaunching the browser, making tab management more stable on macOS devices.
November 29, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 26th, 2025

5 Linux desktop environments that make ditching Windows 10 easy - including my top pick
If you're looking to migrate from Windows 10 or 11 and Linux is in your sights, you might want to try one of these desktop environments to ease the transition.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Collabora Office is an open source desktop suite for Windows, macOS and Linux
Collabora Office is an open source desktop suite for Windows, macOS and Linux
November 23, 2025 — Source

Debian versus Ubuntu: How to pick the right Linux for your workflow
Debian is the classic server Linux, but tends to be the second choice on desktop hardware. It'd be wrong to write off Debian on the desktop.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Fedora SIG Proposed To Improve Production Stability
A Fedora special interest group is being proposed to help improve production stability of Fedora Linux and better handling incident management when problems do arise.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Linux Performance Up ~9% One Year Later At ~85% Power Use
It's been just over one year now since the launch of the Core Ultra 9 285K and other Arrow Lake desktop processors. For those that may be considering an Arrow Lake CPU this holiday season for a Linux desktop or just curious how the power and performance has evolved one year later, here are some leading-edge benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K compared to the launch-day performance last October.
November 23, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 199 is available for testing
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 199 is now available for testing, bringing significant enhancements to the platform's networking capabilities, including support for WiFi 7 and automatic setup for newer wireless capabilities. The update also includes native LLDP/CDP integration, allowing users to better understand their network layout, as well as security patches and stability fixes based on Linux 6.12.58. Other notable improvements include a refreshed Intrusion Prevention System using Suricata version 8.0.2, updated OpenVPN features, and improved system boot management with draceng.
November 23, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive In Dropping X11 Session Support
KDE developers announced they are going "all-in on a Wayland future" and with the Plasma 6.8 desktop it will become Wayland-exclusive. The Plasma X11 session is going away.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Librnp update for Gentoo Linux
A security advisory has been issued for Gentoo Linux, warning users about a vulnerability in the librnp package due to weak random number generation that can be easily cracked. The affected version of librnp, 0.18.0, generates weak session keys for public key encryption, potentially allowing attackers with just the public key to read encrypted messages. Users are advised to upgrade to the latest version of librnp (0.18.1 or higher) as soon as possible and be aware that sensitive information sent using affected software may have been compromised.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Overhauling The Intel TDX Locking Code For KVM
Sean Christopherson of Google sent out the pull requests to the KVM tree of the various x86_64-related areas of virtualization he oversees. With these updates ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window there is a significant overhaul of Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code to address various outstanding problems.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Linux, Erlang, Rails, and more updates for Debian
Multiple Debian security advisories (DSA) were issued, addressing vulnerabilities in various packages, including Linux kernel, pdfminer, tryton-sao, rails, cups-filters, libsdl2, and net-snmp. These updates fix issues related to privilege escalation, denial of service, information leaks, cross-site scripting (XSS), and out-of-bounds reads or writes. The affected packages have been updated with new versions that include security patches, including CVE-2025-21861, CVE-2025-39929, and others.
November 23, 2025 — Source

LXQt-Panel 2.3.1 released
The LXQt team has released a new point update for the LXQt desktop environment, making version 2.3.1 of the lxqt-panel available for download. The LXQt panel serves as the taskbar and central hub where users interact with their system, utilizing interactive elements known as "plugins" or "widgets." This latest release includes updates that improve stability for developers working on older systems, particularly those using Qt < 6.8, by adjusting the build process to work with earlier versions of the Qt library.
November 23, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Is Interested In Helping Bring Vulkan Video To Chrome
NVIDIA engineers are interested in helping Google bring Vulkan Video accelerated GPU video decoding to the Chrome/Chromium web browser.
November 23, 2025 — Source

OpenJDK, Kernel, MuPDF updates for Ubuntu
Several security updates are available for Ubuntu Linux, addressing various vulnerabilities. These include updates for OpenJDK 21, 25, 8, 11, and 17, as well as the MuPDF library. Additionally, there are kernel vulnerability patches available for Linux on Raspberry Pi and general Linux systems.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Radeon Software for Linux 25.20.3 Released - "Exclusively Open-Source" With RADV
With the great upstream support for AMD Radeon graphics in the Linux kernel and Mesa, most desktop users / gamers / enthusiasts are best off just using the latest code shipped by their distributions or via the enthusiast-supported third-party archives/repositories. But for those on older enterprise Linux distributions, Radeon Software for Linux 25.20.3 was recently released for shipping that packaged AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This 25.20 series is the big one where they are now officially supporting the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver in place of their own former Vulkan Linux driver.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Rocky Linux 10.1 released
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has released Rocky Linux 10.1, built from sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 and designed to provide a reliable platform for applications. This new version includes notable features such as systemd soft reboots, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) updates, and XFS file system upgrades, in addition to updated software packages like .NET 10 and Node.js 24. Rocky Linux prioritizes thorough testing, with this release undergoing two weeks of rigorous checks across various environments before its release.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Rocky Linux 10.1 Released As Community Alternative To RHEL 10.1
Following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 earlier this month, Rocky Linux 10.1 is now available for this popular community-driven alternative to RHEL 10.1.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Tuxedo Computers slams lid on Arm Linux laptop after 18 months of pain
Planned Snapdragon goes puff and disappears, but the code will survive
November 23, 2025 — Source

Urgent ACPI Revert For Linux 6.18 To Deal With Some Hardware Crashing
The Linux 6.18 kernel is anticipated for release this coming Sunday while this week a last-minute crisis was averted following reports of a kernel crash from recent ACPI code changes.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Windows 10 retirement pushes 780,000 users to Linux as Zorin OS Hits 1M downloads — but Microsoft still wants to evolve Windows 11 into an agentic AI OS
The Zorin OS developer recently disclosed that the Linux distro gained approximately 780,000 users from Windows, a little over a month since Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows 10.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.17.10b released
Zen Browser has released a new version, 1.17.10b, which brings the browser up to date with the latest Firefox version (145.0.2). This update includes various bug fixes to improve the overall performance and stability of Zen Browser. Specifically, developers have resolved issues with the download animation and the Glance feature's activation when using Ctrl or Shift while clicking links.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 23rd, 2025

Frustrated users crowdfund a $2,000 fix for Lenovo Legion 'speakers not working properly' error — bug bounty posted, coder wins the cash by fixing complex audio annoyance in just a month
Six folks pledged lumps of cash to make it happen.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Google Looks To Bring JPEG-XL Support Back To Chrome / Chromium
Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Glibc Math Code Sees 4x Improvement On AMD Zen By Changing FMA Implementation
Merged this week to the GNU C Library "glibc" code is dropping the ldbl-96 FMA implementation from this library as in doing so they found a 4x improvement to throughput and latency on AMD Zen 3 hardware.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Linux Patches Improve Intel Nested VM Memory Performance Up To ~2353x In Synthetic Test
AWS engineers have been working on Linux kernel improvements to KVM's VMX code for enhancing the unmanaged guest memory when dealing with nested virtual machines. The improved code addresses some correctness issues as well as delivering wild performance improvements within a synthetic benchmark.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Linux Security Roundup for Week 47, 2025
Several Linux distributions released security updates last week to address various vulnerabilities and patches for packages such as kernel, libssh, vim, and others. Distributions including AlmaLinux, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux, Slackware Linux, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu Linux have received these updates, with some affecting multiple versions of the operating system. The security issues addressed include arbitrary code execution, denial-of-service attacks, heap buffer over-reads, NULL pointer dereferences, and other types of vulnerabilities in software packages like Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, and more. These updates can be installed using package managers such as dnf for Fedora Linux or by applying a valid GPG key for some distributions.
November 23, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 22nd, 2025

Algol 68 GCC Compiler Patches Updated With Modules System Added
Since the start of the new year, there have been patches being posted for proposing a new GCC compiler front-end for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language. Oracle engineer Jose Marchesi has been leading the Algol 68 effort for GCC and this weekend posted a new revision of the patches, which now includes a working modules system implementation.
November 22, 2025 — Source

FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 Ships Latest OpenZFS, KDE Dropped From DVD ISO Due To Size Constraints
FreeBSD 15.0 is working toward its stable release in early December. As part of reaching that major release, FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 released today as what may be the final release candidate before FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Grafana Unveils Smarter Logs, an MCP Server, and TraceQL Upgrades in Latest Releases
Grafana Labs has published major updates across two of its core observability products: Grafana 12.3, and Grafana Tempo 2.9. The two releases have distinct improvements in monitoring and tracing for Grafana users.
November 21, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Provide A Much Better Experience For High Refresh Rate Displays
More features continue piling on for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop, including an important performance fix this week for those running displays with a higher than 60Hz refresh rate.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 To Enable Both Touchscreens On The AYANEO Flip DS Dual-Screen Handheld
Sent out today were a set of input subsystem fixes for the near-final Linux 6.18 kernel. A bit of a notable addition via this "fixes" pull is getting both touchscreens working on the AYANEO Flip DS, a dual-screen gaming handheld device that can be loaded up with Linux.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Linux Device Trees For Cancelled Products? Don't "Waste Time"
Yesterday TUXEDO Computers cancelled their Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop plans. In their announcement discontinuing work on this X1E Linux laptop, they said they would still upstream the Device Tree support to the mainline Linux kernel. Indeed they posted a new revision of their DT patches on Friday for the Linux kernel, but there is diminishing outlook that they will be accepted upstream for this cancelled product.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Olmo 3 Release Provides Full Transparency into Model Development and Training
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence has launched Olmo 3, an open-source language model family that offers researchers and developers comprehensive access to the entire model development process. Unlike earlier releases that provided only final weights, Olmo 3 includes checkpoints, training datasets, and tools for every stage of development, encompassing pretraining and post-training for reasoning, instruction following, and reinforcement learning.
November 21, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.5.0, PHP 8.4.15, and 8.3.28 Debian packages released
Ondřej Surý has released the latest PHP packages for Debian GNU/Linux users, including updates for PHP 8.5.0, PHP 8.4.15, and PHP 8.3.28 for various Debian versions. The new PHP 8.5 major release introduces several notable features, such as a "URI" extension that allows direct manipulation of URIs in code. Other enhancements include the pipe operator (|>), which streamlines complex operations by letting you chain commands naturally, and improvements to object and array cloning, function return values, and closure usage.
November 21, 2025 — Source

RISC-V Testing Lapse Resulted In Wrong MIPS RISC-V Vendor ID Landing In Linux 6.18
An interesting anecdote from this week's batch of RISC-V fixes for the Linux 6.18 kernel exposed that the MIPS RISC-V/JEDEC vendor ID was wrong for code merged at the start of the kernel cycle. The testing hadn't caught it either as the QEMU emulation also ended up inadvertently using the wrong vendor ID too.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux laptop cancelled due to performance concerns — Linux PC maker says Qualcomm CPU is 'less suitable for Linux than expected'
Developing Linux for the Snapdragon X1 Elite took way too long.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 21st, 2025

ASUS Armoury Driver Set To Be Introduced In Linux 6.19
Expected to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is the ASUS Armoury "asus-armoury" driver for enhancing support for the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handhelds and other ASUS enthusiast/gaming devices under Linux.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Clang 21 Delivering Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC Zen 4 With HBM3
One of the areas I've been meaning to run more benchmarks on this season has been for the recently released Clang 21 compiler. Back in September when LLVM Clang 21 was debuting I ran some initial benchmarks and found it to deliver some nice performance gains on AMD EPYC Zen 5 but then have been busy with other benchmarks/articles for expanding that testing.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Intel Continues Working On Dynamic PAMT To Reduce Memory Overhead For TDX
One of the improvements that Intel software engineers have been working on for the Linux kernel around their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) functionality for confidential computing VMs is reducing the memory use. That work is under the Dynamic PAMT umbrella and this week brought the latest iteration of patches to help lower RAM use when engaging TDX for confidential VMs.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Intel Linux Driver Working To Enable "CMTG" Feature For Lunar Lake Onwards
With Lunar Lake and newer Intel graphics there is a new feature called the Common Mode Timing Generator (CMTG) that so far hasn't been enabled by the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver. But patches being worked on are enabling this CMTG feature that will unlock other functionality moving forward.
November 21, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20251120 released
KDE neon has released its latest version, offering users immediate access to the newest KDE Plasma features directly from Ubuntu's long-term support base. This distribution presents unmodified versions of KDE applications and tools, allowing enthusiasts to experience fresh KDE releases without waiting for community adjustments.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 To Add Support For The Realtek RTL8125K
The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Realtek RTL8125K as a forthcoming Ethernet ASIC.
November 21, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA 580.94.11 Linux Driver Brings HDR Metadata Support
NVIDIA today issued the 580.94.11 driver release as their newest Vulkan beta driver for Linux customers. Most notable with this beta driver update is adding VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Rust dev shoots down hopes of playing the hit survival game on Valve's Steam Machine: "There are no plans to support Proton or Linux"
Valve's Steam Machine is an exciting prospect, not least because it allows for all sorts of popular games to now be played comfortably in your living room. Players of survival game Rust are keen for such an option; however, their hopes have been dashed due to that most irritating of hurdles: compatibility issues.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Servo Announces Sponsorship Tiers To Get More Organizations Backing This Browser Engine
The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now announced sponsorship tiers in hopefully to solicit more donations from larger organizations.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Sovereign Tech Fund Hiring A New Leader For Driving Open-Source Funding
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund / Sovereign Tech Agency has been a godsend the past few years for the open-source community. This funding from the German government has led to significant funding for dozens of prominent open-source infrastructure projects to provide more resources for enhancing security, enabling new features, and more. As the Sovereign Tech Fund prepares for the next phase of growth, they are hiring a new head to lead the efforts.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Steam Frame Using Mesa's Turnip Vulkan Open-Source Driver
In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa's open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.
November 21, 2025 — Source

TUXEDO Computers Drops Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux Laptop Plans
Back in mid-2024, the Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers teased plans for developing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop. Initially they hoped to have it out by Christmas 2024. That didn't happen and now approaching Christmas 2025 they confirmed they have stopped their plans for shipping a Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop for Linux customers.
November 21, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 20th, 2025

Canonical Gets Flutter Up And Running On RISC-V For Ubuntu
Canonical has been bullish on RISC-V with Ubuntu being one of the most common Linux distributions endorsed by RISC-V board vendors. Canonical also has been bullish on the Flutter toolkit for crafting their desktop installer UI and other modern UI/app interfaces. But these two together haven't panned out with Flutter not currently supporting RISC-V. Canonical has submitted pull requests now for enabling RISC-V support with Flutter.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Dell Now Shipping Laptop With Qualcomm NPU On Linux Ahead Of Windows 11
Dell announced today that their new Pro Max 16 Plus laptop with a Qualcomm discrete NPU is now shipping... That is if you are running Ubuntu Linux while the Windows 11 pre-load option is expected in early 2026. An exciting twist with the Linux version of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus shipping before Microsoft Windows.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Firefox 147 Will Support The XDG Base Directory Specification
A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users' home directory.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Intel Preps Linux KVM For Diamond Rapids' AVX10.2 & Expanded AMX
The latest feature enablement work happening by Intel for the Linux kernel with next-generation Diamond Rapids server processors are the adjustments to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for readying the new CPU ISA capabilities for a virtualized world.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Kubernetes CSI Drivers
What does a storage standard specification look like? Why do we need it, and which problem does it solve? How does it work in practice, and what impact can it have?
November 20, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Sees Late Improvements For Xbox Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, & Alienware Laptops
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-x86-Plat-Near-Final
November 20, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Nova Driver Landing Boot42 Support For Next-Gen NVIDIA GPUs
Along with getting the NVIDIA GSP fully booted and initialized for Ampere GPUs with the Nova driver code coming to Linux 6.19, this next kernel version is also beginning to make preparations for eyeing next-generation NVIDIA GPU support on this open-source driver.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Slated To Land "mm/cid" Rewrite That Has Very Positive Performance Potential
A set of Linux kernel patches posted back in October for rewriting the kernel's memory-mapped concurrency ID code for some nice performance wins looks like it will land for Linux 6.19. This is the code that prominent Intel engineer Thomas Gleixner found to yield up to an 18% improvement for the PostgreSQL database. My testing of this "mm/cid" code has also shown some nice performance wins too.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint versus Zorin OS: I compared the two Windows alternatives, and here's my advice
Linux Mint and Zorin OS are both popular Linux distros - but which one should you install? Here's my reasoning.
November 20, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.28 and 8.4.15 Fedora/RHEL Packages released
Remi Collet has released updated Fedora packages for PHP 8.3.28 and 8.4.15, which address various issues, including bugs in the core code and its extensions. These updates are available through the remi-modular repository and can be installed on Fedora systems running version 41 or higher, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream, and Rocky Linux. The bug fixes resolve problems with auto_globals_jit, assertion failures, memory leaks, and security vulnerabilities in extensions such as DOM, Exif, FPM, GD, Intl, MySQLnd, Opcache, PgSql, Phar, Random, SimpleXML, Streams API, Tidy, XMLReader, and Windows extensions.
November 20, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.5 Released With New Pipe Operator, New URI Extension & Clone With
PHP 8.5 is out today as the annual major feature release for this popular scripting language.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Rusticl Has Turned Out Remarkably Well For Open-Source OpenCL For Mesa Drivers
Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has turned out remarkably well. Rusticl performance has evolved quite well for this Rust-based OpenCL driver and it continues tacking on new features / OpenCL extensions as well as working gracefully with more Mesa drivers. Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst presented on some of the recent accomplishments for this driver back at XDC2025.
November 20, 2025 — Source

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support -- with long list of caveats
PostmarketOS pushed for the change, but devs warn it may not last
November 20, 2025 — Source

Updated Steam Runtime Switches To Debian 13 Libraries, SDL2 Using Compatibility Layer
An updated version of the Steam Linux Runtime 4 branch was rolled out that has now shifted from Debian 11 to Debian 13 libraries for some significant upgrades. In the process more libraries have gone x86_64 only in foregoing the i386 builds. In addition, the SDL 2 library support for the Steam Runtime is now provided by sdl2-compat as the compatibility layer for SDL2 atop SDL3.
November 20, 2025 — Source

vkd3d 1.18 released
The vkd3d team has released version 1.18, a significant update to their Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation library that brings numerous improvements and new features. The update includes advancements such as support for CreateCommandList1() on ID3D12Device4 interface, improved performance through constant folding, and enhanced shader execution flow. Additionally, the team has refined older systems by adding support for integer types in conditional expressions and translating Direct3D bytecode instructions from the past.
November 20, 2025 — Source or Source

Software — Open Source — November 14th, 2025

AMD GAIA 0.13 Released With New AI Coding & Docker Agents
AMD's GAIA open-source project as a reminder is their "Generrative AI Is Awesome" quick-setup solution for demonstrating generative AI use on AMD hardware platforms with Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and/or Ryzen AI NPUs. GAIA is predominantly Microsoft Windows focused but recently they did introduce limited support for Linux that is currently bound to Vulkan-accelerated GPU support.
November 14, 2025 — Source

AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs Will Default To AMDGPU Driver In Linux 6.19, SMART POWER OLED Added
Sent out today is likely the last batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver feature updates ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window getting underway around the start of December. And it's an exciting one too from adding a new SMART POWER OLED feature to switching from the Radeon to AMDGPU drivers by default for aging GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Bazzite 43.20251114 released
Bazzite Linux has released its latest version, 43.20251114, which brings several improvements to the gaming experience on the platform. This build comes with pre-installed Steam, HDR and VRR support, and updated CPU schedulers for smoother performance. The release also streamlines game installation, allowing users to easily access games on various platforms, like GOG and Epic Games Store, through a familiar Steam-like interface. Overall, this update reflects the ongoing collaboration between developers and users, with tweaks and removals aimed at enhancing user experience and making Bazzite a solid choice for gaming on Linux.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Fedora 44 Looking At Replacing FBCON With KMSCON As Default VT Console
Fedora 44 is looking at replacing the Linux kernel's console "FBCON" with the user-space-based KMSCON implementation. Eventually the hope remains to deprecate the FBCON/FBDEV code within the Linux kernel.
November 14, 2025 — Source

GNU C Library Adds Linux "mseal" Function For Memory Sealing
Introduced last year in the Linux 6.10 kernel was the mseal system call for memory sealing to protect the memory mapping against modifications to seal non-writable memory segments or better protecting sensitive data structures. The GNU C Library has finally introduced its mseal function making use of this modern Linux kernel functionality.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Intel Submits Last Batch Of Xe Driver Feature Updates For Linux 6.19
Intel today sent out their last batch of planned feature patches for their Xe kernel graphics driver of material intended for Linux 6.19.
November 14, 2025 — Source

KDE Frameworks 6.20 released
KDE Frameworks 6.20.0 has been released, bringing a mix of upgrades, performance boosts, and bug fixes to developers. The Attica team made significant progress in this release, improving session management and overall stability. Other notable updates include improved support via Bluez Qt, smoother Breeze Icons, and enhanced functionality in modules such as KArchive and Framework Integration. This release marks another step forward for KDE's steady and regular delivery of developer tools and improvements.
November 14, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20251113 released
KDE neon has released its latest version, offering users immediate access to the newest KDE Plasma features directly from Ubuntu's long-term support base. This distribution presents unmodified versions of KDE applications and tools, allowing enthusiasts to experience fresh KDE releases without waiting for community adjustments. The "Testing" or "Unstable" editions cater specifically to users willing to help polish upcoming KDE releases by receiving early access builds before broader release. KDE neon employs a targeted rolling release approach, focusing on updating specific KDE packages while keeping most system elements stable underneath them.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.17-9 released
Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.17-9 has been released, offering improved performance and responsiveness for desktop users, particularly those engaged in multimedia and gaming workloads. The kernel features several notable improvements, including Zen Interactive Tuning, which prioritizes system speed over power savings, as well as optimized I/O and memory management. Additionally, Liquorix 6.17-9 has several technical upgrades, like better scheduling for high-resolution tasks, improved handling of real-time systems, and support for Budget Fair Queue (BFQ) and TCP BBR2 Congestion Control.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Nouveau Driver To Support Larger Pages & Compression Support With Linux 6.19
While the "Nova" driver continues to be developed as a modern Rust-written, open-source and in-kernel NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, for the time being Nouveau is what's working for end-users for those wanting a mainline open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for gaming and other workloads. With Linux 6.19 the Nouveau driver is picking up support for handling larger pages as well as compression support.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 and 9.7 released
Red Hat has released two major updates to its Enterprise Linux platform: RHEL 10.1 and RHEL 9.7, which bring various improvements to enhance security, reliability, and productivity. A notable feature in RHEL 10.1 is an offline command-line AI assistant, currently in development preview, that helps with common tasks like installation and troubleshooting without an internet connection. The update also includes enhancements such as a higher context limit, validated AI accelerator drivers for integrating machine learning hardware, and improved system management features like reproducible builds and soft reboots.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.333 Released With New Ray-Tracing Extension
One of the new extensions in Vulkan 1.4.333 is VK_EXT_custom_resolve. This extension allows using shaders to resolve multi-sample rendering attachments. VK_EXT_custom_resolve was worked on by several Valve engineers including Mike Blumenkrantz, Connor Abbott, and Samuel Pitoiset. Plus engineers from Qualcomm, ARM, Igalia, LunarG, and NVIDIA.
November 14, 2025 — Source

The Headaches Supporting Content Protection With Linux GPU Drivers
Intel driver engineer Suraj Kandpal presented at the recent X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2025) on the challenges around supporting content protection on Linux such as for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and Protected Audio Video Path (PAVP).
November 14, 2025 — Source

WinBoat 0.9 Alpha released
WinBoat 0.9 Alpha has been released, allowing users to test running Windows applications on their Linux system using an Electron app designed with Docker or Podman support. This update includes new features such as Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app detection and launch capabilities, customizable shortcuts for launching specific programs, and improved configuration options like adjustable scaling settings and FreeRDP argument modification. The team has also made significant changes to improve stability, including automatic unmounting of installation ISOs and corrections to typographical errors.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Wine 10.19 Released With More Improvements
Ahead of the Wine 11.0 code freeze beginning in early December, Wine 10.19 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux.
November 14, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 13th, 2025

Avalonia brings Linux, browser support to Microsoft's MAUI cross-platform app solution
Third-party framework builds alternative backend using its own renderer and WebAssembly
November 13, 2025 — Source

Banned Russian antivirus maker Kaspersky rolls out new products — basic plan for Linux starts at $59.99 a year
Kaspersky wants a piece of the Linux pie.
November 13, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs Rolls Out Metadata Version Reconcile "rebalance_v2" Feature
For those making use of the out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system driver, rolling out to the snapshot/nightly testing channel is the long-in-development "rebalance_v2" functionality now known as the "bcachefs_metadata_version_reconcile" feature.
November 13, 2025 — Source

Canonical To Now Provide Up To 15 Years Commercial Support For Ubuntu LTS Releases
Canonical To Now Provide Up To 15 Years Commercial Support For Ubuntu LTS Releases
November 13, 2025 — Source

Fish 4.2.1 released
Fish version 4.2.1 has been released, addressing some important issues that were causing trouble for users. A common setup for installing Fish would sometimes lead to missing internal help files and man pages, even when documentation settings were disabled or dependencies were met. This problem has been resolved in the latest update, ensuring that built-in resources appear correctly under these conditions.
November 13, 2025 — Source

LibreOffice 25.8.3 released
LibreOffice 25.8.3 has been released as the third minor update of the year for the free office suite designed to help users get work done. This latest version includes seventy improvements compared to its October release. LibreOffice's core technology, LibreOffice Technology, allows developers to create desktop apps, mobile versions, and cloud services that support both open ODF formats and Microsoft's OOXML standard. The software is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, iOS, and can be accessed from the cloud.
November 13, 2025 — Source

Linux Has Another Maintainer Now For Its DEC Alpha Port
The Linux kernel's port to the DEC Alpha processors remains alive over 30 years after these processors first appeared.
November 13, 2025 — Source

Linux Looks To Remove SHA1 Support For Signing Kernel Modules
Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week are seeking to remove SHA1 support for signing of kernel modules. This is part of the larger effort in the industry for moving away from SHA1 given its vulnerabilities to hash collisions and superior hashing algorithms being available.
November 13, 2025 — Source

Miracle-WM 0.8 Adds More Features For This Mir-Powered Wayland Compositor
Miracle-WM 0.8 was released on Wednesday as another step forward for this tiling Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir software. Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek continues driving new features into Miracle-WM as it works toward its v1.0 milestone.
November 13, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

NVIDIA CUDA 13.0 U2 Brings DGX Spark Performance Improvements
CUDA 13.0 Update 2 is now available as the latest incremental improvement to NVIDIA's compute stack.
November 13, 2025 — Source

OpenAI and NYT Clash Over Millions of Private ChatGPT Conversations
When 800 million people use ChatGPT weekly for their most personal digital conversations, a fight like this does not stay in the courtroom.
November 13, 2025 — Source

OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.1 model with upgrades to speed and customization
Eight new style presets mean to enhance conversations
November 13, 2025 — Source

OpenAI's colossal AI data center targets would consume as much electricity as entire nation of India — 250GW target would require 30 million GPUs annually to ensure continuous operation, emit twice as much carbon dioxide as ExxonMobil
How much more artificial intelligence can the planet take?
November 13, 2025 — Source

Possible Setback For Linux x86_64 Laptops: Prominent Developer Joins Qualcomm
Back in early September we reported on a Linux hardware enablement leader planning to leave Red Hat. Hans de Goede has been a longtime contributor to improving Intel/AMD Linux desktop/laptop hardware support and in fact an x86 platform drivers subsystem maintainer. We now found out where this lead Linux x86 driver developer ended up: Qualcomm.
November 13, 2025 — Source

RadeonSI OpenGL Mesh Shader Support Is Now Completed For Mesa 26.0
For next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver will present OpenGL mesh shaders support. It's been a long journey from the GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension being crafted and merged to wiring up the Mesa driver support while now it's in place for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver.
November 13, 2025 — Source

Tails 7.2 released
Tails 7.2 has been released for download, featuring an updated Tor Browser integration with version 15.0.1 and improved organization options through vertical tabs and tab groups. The update also includes a polished address bar search function and a bumped-up Thunderbird version to 140.4.0, which brings its own set of enhancements and refinements. Power users should note that Root Console access is no longer available directly within the OS, requiring the use of a command to access it instead.
November 13, 2025 — Source or Source

The Incredible Evolution Of AMD EPYC HPC Performance Shown In The Azure Cloud
Last week the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instances reached general availability as powered by the custom EPYC 9V64H CPUs with HBM3 memory. These very interesting EPYC processors for memory bandwidth intensive workloads were announced last year while have finally reached GA with jaw-dropping results for software able to take advantage of the 6.7 TB/s memory bandwidth thanks to the HBM memory.
November 13, 2025 — Source

To 'Infinity' ... and beyond: MX Linux 25 has arrived
Systemd-free option still available if you choose that download
November 13, 2025 — Source

Top Microsoft exec's boast about Windows 'evolving into an agentic OS' provokes furious backlash over AI — users fed up with forced AI and cloud features
The post's comments section quickly turned into a ravenous pool of AI- and cloud-hating piranhas.
November 13, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut
The goal of 'oxidizing' the Linux distro hits another bump
November 13, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 9th, 2025

AMD Preps More Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.19
AMD continues preparing more kernel driver code for Linux 6.19. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the early December merge window.
November 9, 2025 — Source

Cloud Hypervisor 49 Released With AArch64 + Microsoft Hyper-V Improvements
For what began as an Intel open-source project focused on delivering a modern VMM for cloud workloads and written in Rust is seeing increasingly more exposure on AArch64 and Microsoft Windows platforms. In fact, Intel remains largely inactive now with Cloud Hypervisor after their lead maintainer left the company last year and has now been one year since seeing any significant contributions from Intel to this open-source project.
November 9, 2025 — Source

Lenovo IdeaPad Linux Driver Adding Support For Rapid Charge Mode
Queued into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window is introducing the handling for the "Rapid Charge" USB-C charging mode to the Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver.
November 9, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 Will Better Deal With Corrupt Minix File-Systems
For anyone dealing with Minix file-systems still for this nearly 40 year old creation, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is expected to bring some fixes to the Minix driver for better handling corrupted file-system images.
November 9, 2025 — Source

The Linux Kernel Looks To "Bite The Bullet" In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions
Two patches queued into the Linux kernel's build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change.
November 9, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 8th, 2025

AMD Sends Out Initial GNU Binutils Patch For AMD Zen 6 - Confirms New AVX-512 Features
AMD has begun their open-source compiler enablement upstreaming effort for Zen 6 processors! The first "Znver6" patch was sent out on Friday in preparing for new instructions to be found with these next-generation AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.
November 8, 2025 — Source

Bottles 52.1 released
Bottles has released version 52.1, which brings several useful changes. A key feature allows users to run scripts before launching programs in their Wine containers, making setup tasks easier. The update also includes improved playtime tracking thanks to an upgraded backend system, as well as better integration with the app's other features. Additionally, the release fixes common bugs, such as dedicated sandboxed apps not launching properly and crashes during "bottle" creation setup.
November 8, 2025 — Source

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 5 Released With Build Fixes For Google & Azure Clouds
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted.
November 8, 2025 — Source

Good news for Linux users: This long-requested feature is finally coming to KDE Plasma
Throughout the week, the KDE team worked on the various parts of its desktop environment, finally addressing a 19-year-old (yes, really!) request from users. The developers also fixed a ton of bugs and improved performance.
November 8, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing
KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components.
November 8, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel Patches & Device Tree Additions For PCIe M.2 Connectors
On ACPI-enabled systems Linux users can enjoy PCIe M.2 connected peripherals that "just work" without any extra fuss. But for those relying on Device Tree (DT) handling by the kernel, new patches from Qualcomm are working on representing PCIe M.2 connectors within DT files.
November 8, 2025 — Source

oneDNN 3.10 Continues Preparing For Future Intel CPUs With AVX 10.2
Released one Friday was the newest version of oneDNN as this library started off by Intel and now officially under the UXL Foundation umbrella for serving as building blocks for deep learning software.
November 8, 2025 — Source

Qt Merges Wayland Color Management "color-management-v1"
The Qt toolkit has merged support for Wayland's color-management-v1 protocol to replace the former xx-color-management-v4 protocol shipped by this open-source toolkit. The change was merged for Qt 6.11 development but also back-ported for the Qt 6.10 series.
November 8, 2025 — Source

Ryzen AI Software 1.6.1 Advertises Linux Support
Ryzen AI Software as AMD's collection of tools and libraries for AI inferencing on AMD Ryzen AI class PCs has Linux support with its newest point release. Though this "early access" Linux support is restricted to registered AMD customers.
November 8, 2025 — Source

Tuxedo InfinityBook Max 15 Linux laptop offers desktop-grade power
Tuxedo designs and builds Linux computers. The InfinityBook Max 15 is the German firm's newest Linux laptop, and it arrives with Wayland as the standard graphics system, even on models that use Nvidia GPUs.
November 8, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 7th, 2025

D7VK Aims To Deliver Direct3D 7 Atop Vulkan
DXVK is an important piece of Steam Play (Proton) that over time expanded to supporting Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 and even D3D8 too. Meanwhile VKD3D-Proton delivers Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. Now there is a fork of the DXVK project working to bring Direct3D 7 support atop Vulkan.
November 7, 2025 — Source

How much RAM does your Linux PC really need? My expert advice for 2025
Forget the bare minimum - here's how much RAM you actually need to get the best performance out of your Linux system.
November 7, 2025 — Source

IncusOS Announced As Immutable Linux OS With ZFS For Running Containers
It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical's LXD project as Incus. Now joining the Incus family is IncusOS as an immutable Linux OS built atop a Debian base with OpenZFS file-system support and designed around running containers with Incus.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Intel's Rewrite Of Linux MM CID Code Showing Some Nice Gains For AMD
Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development code.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Kdenlive 25.08.3 released
Kdenlive 25.08.3 is a maintenance update that fixes several common issues with the open-source video editor. The update addresses problems related to pasting clips onto projects with different frame rates, which caused crashes in previous versions, as well as issues with rendering subtitles and managing image sequences. Additionally, version 25.08.3 adds new features such as support for using SVG files, improved disk space management during archiving, and a usability tweak that only applies resize effects to video or image clips.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Linux software management made simple with Discover
Some chores don't have to be difficult
November 7, 2025 — Source

MariaDB 11.8.4, 11.4.9, 10.11.15, and 10.6.24 released
The MariaDB team has released new versions of their popular open-source database, including 11.8.4, 11.4.9, 10.11.15, and 10.6.24, which will receive ongoing support over the next five years. These updates mainly aim to make the InnoDB storage engine more stable and faster, fixing problems like crashes that happen during table operations or with saved statistics.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.3.0 Release Candidate 4 released
Mesa 25.3.0 Release Candidate 4 has been released, marking a significant step towards the final version of the software. This update addresses numerous issues that have arisen in previous releases and is the result of the team's continued efforts to iron out these problems. Several contributors have made notable improvements, including fixes for AMD GPU drivers, virtualization components, and Intel graphics.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Mesa Lands Fixes For HDR With Vulkan Drivers
Merged overnight to Mesa 26.0-devel and likely to be back-ported for the upcoming Mesa 25.3 release are a few fixes around high dynamic range (HDR) support within the common Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) / display code.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Microsoft Contributing "RAMDAX" Driver For Upcoming Linux 6.19 Kernel
A new driver planned to be sent to the mainline Linux kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window is yet another new contribution from Microsoft.
November 7, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.28RC1 and 8.4.15RC1 Fedora/RHEL Packages released
Remi Collet has released new RC packages for PHP versions 8.3.28 and 8.4.15, which are now available for Fedora and RHEL-based systems. The update includes various bug fixes across different components of the programming language, including Core, DOM, Exif, FPM, FTP & SSL, GD, Intl, LibXML, MySQLnd, and Opcache. Notably, PHP 8.4.15RC1 addresses critical issues such as memory leaks, assertion failures, and SSL certificate handling problems. These updates can be accessed through the remi-modular-test repository for recent Fedora versions or the remi-test repository for compatibility checks or testing environments.
November 7, 2025 — Source

PixiEditor 2.0.1.18 released
PixiEditor 2.0.1.18 has received an update with several improvements. The editor's interface remains straightforward and familiar, allowing users of all skill levels to create game sprites or animations and perform general image editing tasks. The update focuses on resolving identified bugs and smoothing out performance issues, such as potential crashes related to null checks and problems with chunk calculations.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.23.3 released
A new stable version of Samba is now available, addressing various issues reported since its previous release, including Time Machine compatibility problems introduced by older versions like 4.22. This latest update resolves several key issues, such as Spotlight search restrictions and a potential crash related to name mangling in 'rpcd_mdssvc.'
November 7, 2025 — Source or Source

Vulkan 1.4.332 Brings A New Qualcomm Extension For AI / ML
Vulkan 1.4.332 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API specification. Besides a number of documentation clarifications/corrections, there is one new extension this week in the name of AI / machine learning.
November 7, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 6th, 2025

/e/OS 3.2 released
The e.foundation has released /e/OS 3.2, introducing several enhancements to its privacy-focused mobile operating system. The update includes real-time leak warnings for apps that try to share data without permission, as well as refinements to the App Lounge, which now displays app sizes and shows region-specific applications. Fairphone users can also look forward to new customization options for their side button and an optimized camera experience on Gen. 6 devices.
November 6, 2025 — Source

CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43
With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop.
November 6, 2025 — Source

Cloudflare Makes Open-Source The Rust Code To Tokio-Quiche
Cloudflare announced today they have open-sourced the code to Tokio-Quiche as their async QUIC library that combines their previously-open-sourced Quiche QUIC implementation with Rust's Tokio async runtime.
November 6, 2025 — Source

CodeWeavers Launches CrossOver Preview For Linux ARM64
CodeWeavers announced this morning a new CrossOver Preview that includes Linux ARM64 support for the first time. This commercial software built atop Wine is now comfortable with the state of running Windows x86/x64 apps on Linux ARM64 and even the ability ro enjoy many Windows games on ARM64 Linux devices like the System76 Thelio Astra.
November 6, 2025 — Source

FreeDesktop.org Adopts The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
Adding to the array of software projects and specifications under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard "FHS" has been adopted by these desktop-focused open-source developers.
November 6, 2025 — Source

Grafana and GitLab Introduce Serverless CI/CD Observability Integration
In a move to streamline development workflows, Daniel Fritzgerald of GrafanaLabs has published a new open-source solution that links GitLab CI/CD events into Grafana's observability stack via a serverless architecture. The integration enables teams to channel GitLab webhooks, such as pushes, merge requests, and pipeline completions, directly into Grafana Cloud Logs (built on Grafana Loki) for real-time visibility and correlation between deploy events and performance metrics.
November 6, 2025 — Source

How to Use Samba File Sharing: Easy Setup for Linux and Windows
Learn how to install, configure, and connect to Samba for Linux & Windows. Share files securely in just minutes with this easy guide.
November 6, 2025 — Source

I got tired of Windows 11, so I converted this Mini PC into a Linux powerhouse - here's how
If you're moving on from Windows, this compact powerhouse from Minix delivers more than enough performance with the right OS.
November 6, 2025 — Source

Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Finally Exposes Pipeline Binary "VK_KHR_pipeline_binary"
Introduced back in August of 2024 with Vulkan 1.3.294 was VK_KHR_pipeline_binary as a pipeline binary extension to retrieve binary data associated with individual pipelines. The focus of this is to bypass the Vulkan pipeline caching mechanism and so applications can manage caches themselves. Finally today for Mesa 26.0-devel the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has enabled this extension.
November 6, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20251106 released
KDE neon 20251106 offers users direct access to the newest KDE Plasma 6.5.2 features, built on top of Ubuntu's long-term support base. This means users get unmodified versions of KDE applications and tools exactly as their developers intended, without proprietary driver tweaks or stability patches. KDE neon is ideal for enthusiasts who want to try out new software quickly and keep their systems aligned with ongoing KDE development cycles from day one.
November 6, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Lands Electronic Privacy Screen Hotkey Handling For Some Dell Laptops
Merged yesterday to the mainline Linux 6.18 development kernel were the latest round of x86 platform driver fixes. Mostly some small fixes but standing out is electronic privacy screen hotkey support for some Dell laptops.
November 6, 2025 — Source

Logging in as root on Linux? Here's why that disaster waiting to happen
If your Linux distro still lets you log in as root, here's why you should never do it.
November 6, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Preparing For Hopper & Blackwell GPU Support With Open-Source Nova Driver
NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the open-source and upstream Nova driver for the Linux kernel. This modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA driver is still taking shape as an alternative to NVIDIA's official downstream open-source driver and the aging and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Out on the horizon for Nova is Hopper and Blackwell GPU support.
November 6, 2025 — Source

RadeonSI + ACO Brings Some Performance Gains For Radeon Workstation Graphics
Last week Mesa 26.0-devel enabled the ACO back-end by default within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all supported Radeon graphics cards by this open-source Linux driver. This move was done in the name of better performance, faster shader compilation times, and ACO being all-around better than the AMDGPU LLVM back-end these days for both OpenGL and Vulkan use. It was also noted that RadeonSI has "slightly better" viewperf performance with NIR+ACO than using the AMDGPU LLVM back-end.
November 6, 2025 — Source

Zed 0.211.4 released
A new version of the Zed editor, 0.211.4, has been released, bringing several updates and improvements to enhance user experience. The update incorporates features like optimizing the Windows build for ARM64 chips, enabling direct Git branch comparison through the command palette, and enhancing the quality of life in the markdown preview for HTML tables and lists. Other notable changes include improved editing of previous messages, enhanced debugging with inline variable viewing, and various UI tweaks, including warnings for outdated settings and improved navigation.
November 6, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 5th, 2025

3mdeb Achieves Good Progress Porting Coreboot+OpenSIL To AMD Turin Motherboard
Over the past few months the open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and AMD's new openSIL silicon initialization library to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a broadly available motherboard that supports the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors. 3mdeb has been fairly successful in their quest and an early demonstrator for openSIL.
November 5, 2025 — Source

7 Linux commands I can't live without after 20 years in the terminal
You don't need the Linux terminal - but once you try it, you'll never go back.
November 5, 2025 — Source

Devuan 6.0.0 Excalibur released
Devuan GNU+Linux 6.0.0 Excalibur has been officially released as an alternative to mainstream Linux distributions that rely on systemd, built upon Debian GNU/Linux 13 (Trixie). This version boasts several significant improvements, including a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version 6.12 with real-time PREEMPT_RT features for high-performance computing and a revamped package management system with APT 3.0 and Solver3.
November 5, 2025 — Source

Fwupd 2.0.17 Released With More Hardware Support & Features
Days after the Linux Vendor Firmware Service celebrated 135 million firmware downloads, a new version of the Fwupd utility is now available for firmware updating systems and peripherals under Linux.
November 5, 2025 — Source

GNOME Mutter Now "Completely Drops The Whole X11 Backend"
The merge to GNOME Mutter has finally happened that "completely drops" the X11 back-end to make GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments.
November 5, 2025 — Source

Intel Xeon 6 Performance Feature Benchmarks: Latency Optimized Mode
A new feature of Intel Xeon 6 "Birch Stream" platforms is the "Latency Optimized Mode" performance setting. The Intel Latency Optimized Mode will keep the uncore clock frequencies higher for more consistent performance but at the cost of increased power use. For those wondering about the performance and power impact, here are some comparison benchmarks of engaging this Latency Optimized Mode with Intel Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" server processors.
November 5, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.19 To Support Additional Arm Mali & Vivante Graphics Hardware
Sent out today to DRM-Next was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next patches for enhancing the various smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers within the kernel. Included with this week's update is supporting some additional Mali and Vivante hardware as well as continuing to enhance the in-kernel accelerator "accel" drivers.
November 5, 2025 — Source

Linux Patches Updated For Snapdragon X Elite Powered TUXEDO Elite 14 Gen1 Laptop
New Linux kernel patches have been posted for the TUXEDO Elite 14 Gen1 laptop, which is powered by a Snapdragon X Elite, indicating continued development toward its release.
November 5, 2025 — Source

LXQt 2.3 released
The LXQt team has released version 2.3.0 of the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment, featuring several key improvements and new features. Notable advancements include enhanced Wayland support, particularly with the LXQt Panel and Custom Command plugin, as well as additions to ScreenGrab and lxqt-qdbus for easier qdbus command access on Wayland compositors. Other notable updates include the addition of "Safely Remove" in PCManFM-Qt, improved user interface options such as disabling file tooltips, and enhancements to QTerminal and QTermWidget with emoji flag support.
November 5, 2025 — Source

LXQt 2.3 Released With Improved Wayland Support
LXQt 2.3 is out today as the newest release of this lightwight, Qt-based desktop environment.
November 5, 2025 — Source

systemd-appd Is A New Component Being Planned By Flatpak Developers
Given this week's release of Flatpak 1.17 for app sandboxing, open-source developer Sebastian Wick published a blog post on Tuesday around the latest Flatpak developments and a look ahead at some of the feature development planned. Arguably most significant of that is the plans for systemd-appd.
November 5, 2025 — Source

The first 8 Linux commands every new user should learn
I learned Linux in the 90s when the command line was mandatory - and it's still the best place to start.
November 5, 2025 — Source

When Debian won't do, Devuan 6 'Excalibur' Linux makes the grade
Debian 13 base, minus systemd and RISC-V build
November 5, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 31st, 2025

AerynOS 2025.10 ISOs Released - GNOME 49, Switches Back To GNU libstdc++
AerynOS 2025.10 ISOs were released today for closing out the month of October. AerynOS as a reminder is the Linux distribution that was started by Ikey Doherty and originally known as Serpent OS that has since evolved into an open-source team effort.
October 31, 2025 — Source

AMD Windows Driver Changes For RX 5000/6000 Series Won't Impact Linux Users
Over the past day there have been many reports of AMD planning to no longer provide game optimizations for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards for their Microsoft Windows driver. Surprisingly many in the Linux community still seem to think it will impact the Linux drivers, but long story short, there is no real concern for Linux users/gamers.
October 31, 2025 — Source

Another European agency shifts off Big Tech, as digital sovereignty movement gains steam
European Union states are increasingly shifting toward European-based companies that offer open-source solutions.
October 31, 2025 — Source

CISA: High-severity Linux flaw now exploited by ransomware gangs
CISA confirmed on Thursday that a high-severity privilege escalation flaw in the Linux kernel is now being exploited in ransomware attacks.
October 31, 2025 — Source

KosmicKrisp Now Vulkan 1.3 Compliant For Apple Devices
Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation.
October 31, 2025 — Source

Krita Lands Basic HDR Support On Wayland
The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting application is the latest creative app now supporting high dynamic range (HDR) on Linux when using Wayland.
October 31, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18-rc4 Fixes Another Performance Regression In The Power Management Code
Last week there was a fix for a "serious performance regression" in the Linux kernel's power management code that affected some Intel-powered Chromebooks. This week the power management fixes ahead of Linux 6.18-rc4 is addressing another performance regression.
October 31, 2025 — Source

Linux vendors are getting into Ubuntu -- and Snap
Ubuntu's much-maligned format may be finally reaching critical mass
October 31, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 Benchmarks: Some Minor & Rare Performance Advantages For Desktop Workloads
Yesterday Canonical announced architecture variants for Ubuntu Linux with Ubuntu 25.10 seeing the introduction of "amd64v3" packages that are built for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level to assume AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU ISA features found since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator processors. Eager to run some initial tests, here is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 performance for desktop workloads.
October 31, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.331 Brings Two New Extensions
Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.330 brought five new extensions, Vulkan 1.4.331 is now available with another two new extensions for this high performance graphics and compute API.
October 31, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 30th, 2025

AMD ROCm 7.1 Release Appears Imminent
AMD continues with their aggressive efforts to enhance their GPU software compute ecosystem with ROCm. The fire under them has been lit and they have been taking their software efforts more expeditiously in recent times to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem and ensuring their Instinct hardware is properly primed to compete. The release dance has begun for ROCm 7.1.
October 30, 2025 — Source or Source

AMD Strix Point Performance Continues Evolving Nicely With Ubuntu 25.10
This week marks fifteen months since AMD Strix Point laptops began shipping. Back at the end of July 2024 the Linux performance and support was already in good shape while since then the Linux performance has only evolved even more to make these AMD Zen 5 laptops perform even better. Here is a fresh look at how the performance has evolved since launch day and the added gains when moving to the recently released Ubuntu 25.10 and some performance advantages too if moving to the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.
October 30, 2025 — Source

Cameo sues OpenAI for trademark infringement over new AI-generated celebrity video app
Cameo, the Chicago-based celebrity video messaging website, has become the latest company to sue OpenAI, alleging trademark infringement for the technology giant's new service that makes AI-generated celebrity videos under the same Cameo name.
October 30, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20251030 released
KDE neon 20251030 has been released, offering users access to the latest KDE updates and software features. Based on Ubuntu's long-term support release, KDE neon showcases KDE software exactly as the developers intended it without patches or modifications. The distribution is geared towards tech-savvy individuals who value quick access to new KDE features and includes a rolling release model specifically for KDE software, where certain packages are updated as needed.
October 30, 2025 — Source

KDE tidies up Plasma 6.5 with 60-odd fixes and smoother setup for OEMs
Big release with a lot of new features -- and a few inevitable glitches
October 30, 2025 — Source

LVFS + Fwupd Serve Up More Than 135 Million Firmware Downloads For Linux Users
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that goes hand-in-hand with the Fwupd open-source firmware updating utility celebrated the milestone on Wednesday of crossing 135 million firmware updates.
October 30, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.2.6 released
Mesa, a free and open-source library for 3D graphics rendering, has released its latest version - Mesa 25.2.6, which includes various enhancements and bug fixes across multiple components. The release features improvements to Vulkan support, including better performance and stability, as well as enhancements to OpenGL support, such as fixing issues with store operations and precompiled shaders. Additionally, the Radeon and RadeonSI drivers have seen significant enhancements, including improvements to video encoding and vertex buffer emission.
October 30, 2025 — Source

OpenAI's Sora App Adds Character Cameos and Video Stitching Tools
OpenAI has rolled out another update to its Sora AI video app, one that builds on its existing video generation features with new tools designed to help users create longer, more narrative-driven content.
October 30, 2025 — Source

Qt Creator 18 Released With Experimental Support For Development Containers
Qt Creator 18 is now available as the latest version of this Qt/C++-focused integrated development environment.
October 30, 2025 — Source

Rust 1.91 Promotes Windows On 64-bit ARM To Tier-1 Status
The Rust project announced today the release of Rust 1.91 as the latest update to this popular programming language priding itself on memory safety capabilities.
October 30, 2025 — Source

X.Org X Server update for Ubuntu
A security issue was discovered in the X.Org X Server, which affects Ubuntu 25.10, 25.04, 24.04 LTS, and 22.04 LTS. The vulnerability allows an attacker to cause a denial of service, obtain sensitive information, or possibly execute arbitrary code by exploiting incorrect memory operations handled by the X Server. To fix the issue, users need to update their system to the latest package versions, which include xserver-xorg-core 2:21.1.18-1ubuntu1.1 and xwayland 2:24.1.6-1ubuntu1.1 for Ubuntu 25.10.
October 30, 2025 — Source

Xorg-Server, OpenSSL, Pdns-Recursor, Intel-Microcode updates for Debian
Several Debian Security Advisories have been released to address vulnerabilities in various packages, including xorg-server, openssl, pdns-recursor, and intel-microcode. The advisories recommend upgrading the affected packages to their latest versions, which can be found on the security tracker page for each package. For example, the xorg-server vulnerability has been fixed in version 2:21.1.7-3+deb12u11 (bookworm) and 2:21.1.16-1.3+deb13u1 (trixie).
October 30, 2025 — Source

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

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