Linux 7.1-rc2 Bringing Some More Improvements/Fixes For Older AMD GPUs
Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week’s batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes… ⌘ Read more

KDE Linux Now Using KMSCON For A Better VT Console Experience
KDE Linux continues making progress as the in-house Linux distribution to best showcase the latest KDE Plasma desktop innovations… ⌘ Read more

VideoLAN Publishes Dav2d For Open-Source AV2 Decoder
While the Alliance For Open Media had been aiming for the AV2 release by the end of 2025, as of right now the AV2 specification remains in a draft status. VideoLAN developers though for months have already been working on dav2d as an open-source AV2 decoder and that code was published this weekend… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.1 Beta Released For Early Testing
Following last year’s release of FreeBSD 15.0, FreeBSD 15.1 is working its way toward release release in June. For kicking off the release dance, FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 1 is available today for testing… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Ships Fixes For Descriptor Heaps, More Vulkan Performance Optimizations
NVIDIA on Friday released the 595.44.06 beta driver build as their newest Vulkan developer beta for Linux. This was joined by the NVIDIA 595.46 Windows Vulkan beta and there are performance improvements in tow and more work on their descriptor heaps support… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6.5 Fixes Some NVIDIA Performance Issues, More Features Land For Plasma 6.7
We are now just one month out from the planned release of Plasma 6.7 in mid-June. Feature activity continues to be brisk for Plasma 6.7 while KDE developers also continue landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 series… ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux In April Pulled Back From Its Record High Marketshare
Steam on Linux use in March had skyrocketed to 5.33%, a 3.1% boost month-over-month and easily the highest level we’ve seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago. This record growth came amid the ongoing success of the Steam Deck handheld and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling more Windows games to run well on Linux. The April numbers are in and the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back somewhat but still remaining healthy… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.8 Improves VBScript Compatibility, Finally Fixes Microsoft Golf 1999
Wine 11.8 delivers the latest and greatest support for running Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms. This newest bi-weekly development release brings several more enhancements in working toward Wine 12.0 stable due out in early 2027… ⌘ Read more

EndeavourOS “Trtion” To Ship New Desktop/WM Options, Titan Neo Brings Various Updates
In addition to today’s monthly ISO refresh of Arch Linux that is now pulling in the Linux 7.0 kernel and other updates, the downstream EndeavourOS also happens to be out with a new ISO release for starting the month of May… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.350 Released With Three New Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.350 released earlier today as the newest routine spec update. Beyond the usual minor fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.350 tacks on three more extensions… ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts HDMI 2.1 FRL Patches For Their AMDGPU Linux Driver
It’s not complete HDMI 2.1 support but to much surprise hitting the mailing list today were official patches from AMD for implementing HDMI Fixed Rate Link “FRL” support for their kernel graphics driver. HDMI FRL as part of HDMI 2.1+ allows for higher bandwidth to support higher refresh rates and resolutions… ⌘ Read more

Linux Support Coming For The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II: A $160 High-End Gaming Controller
The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II is a recently-launched wireless gaming controller for both PC and Xbox gaming. This is a premium controller priced at $160 USD and has been receiving positive reviews under Windows while now it will soon be seeing mainline Linux support… ⌘ Read more

Mesa Developers Consider Branching Off Some Older GPU Drivers - Including AMD R300/R600
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve’s Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa’s older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and man … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Release, Age Verification Laws, Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 & Other April Happenings
A lot happened in the Linux and open-source world during the month of April. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 shipped, a lot of news around age attestation/verification laws, the Linux 7.0 kernel was released, Linux 7.1 is bringing many exciting changes as well as removing of old hardware drivers, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU was released, we began testing the Intel Arc Pro B70 “BMG-G31”, and much more software and hardware co … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 To Set Default DRM Scheduler Priority To “Fair”, New AIE4 Hardware In AMDXDNA
Even while the Linux 7.1 merge window was still ongoing this month, the initial “drm-misc-next” pull request to DRM-Next was sent out for beginning to queue new feature material toward the Linux 7.2 kernel coming this summer… ⌘ Read more

Shotcut 26.4 Released With Timeline Improvements, Vulkan Accelerated Speech-To-Text
Shotcut 26.4.30 shipped today as the latest and greatest version of this open-source, cross-platform video editor… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint To Begin Publishing HWE ISOs For Better Hardware Support
Due to Linux Mint moving to a longer development cycle with their next release not due until December, Linux Mint developers have decided to begin regularly publishing hardware enablement “HWE” ISOs with newer Linux kernel versions to provide better support for new hardware… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Linux Performance Leading Over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Fedora Workstation 44
It’s not too entirely surprising given the aggressive stance that the CachyOS Linux distribution has taken on out-of-the-box performance, but for those curious, it continues largely leading over the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 distributions for the leading performance on modern hardware. ⌘ Read more

AerynOS Updated With Linux 7.0, Gaming Optimized Kernel Flavor
AerynOS, the Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS, is out with a new monthly ISO refresh and details on other recent improvements to this original, from-scratch Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1-rc1 Showing Off Some Wins On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads… ⌘ Read more

3mdeb Gets More Bits Of AMD openSIL & Coreboot Working On Ryzen AM5 Motherboard
There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone … ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Newest Linux Patches To Accelerate Page Migration For Better Performance
Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results… ⌘ Read more

Servo Browser Engine Seeing Progress On FreeBSD Support
Following the recent Servo 0.1 release, the Servo project has published their latest monthly status report to highlight recent development efforts around this modern open-source browser engine… ⌘ Read more

The Intel Lunar Lake CPU Performance Gains On Linux Over The Past Year
Recently I ran benchmarks looking at the Xe2 graphics performance gains on Intel Lunar Lake over the past year with what’s shipped by Ubuntu and comparing against our original tests of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. With those Lunar Lake iGPU benchmarks out of the way, here is a look at how the Lunar Lake CPU performance has evolved on Linux since April 2025. ⌘ Read more

Linux’s sched_ext Sees A Bunch Of Bug Fixes Following Increased AI Code Review
Just days after the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release, the Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” is seeing a lot of bug fixes. Many of these bug fixes aren’t just from the Linux 7.1 merge window but a number date back many kernel cycles. This uptick in bug fixes for sched_ext is coming due to increased AI code review… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Zed 1.0 Code Editor Released
Zed, the cross platform, open-source text/code editor written by the developers behind the Atom editor, has finally reached version 1.0… ⌘ Read more

Hygon C86-4G CPU Support Added To The GCC 17 Compiler
Merged today to the GCC Git compiler codebase, which will be for GCC 17 rather than the imminent GCC 16.1 stable release, is adding support for the Chinese-manufactured Hygon C86-4G-M4 / C86-4G-M6 / C86-4G-M7 series x86_64 processors… ⌘ Read more

Wayland Developers Target June For Weston 16 Release
Weston 16.0 could ship by the end of June with good color management and HDR support along with other new features for this reference Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Devuan Developer Working On Reviving GTK2 With Modern Fixes
A Devuan developer, the Linux distribution that provides a Debian-based operating system without dependence on systemd, is working on “gtk2-ng” for providing modern fixes and improvements to the old GTK2 toolkit… ⌘ Read more

AMD Introducing New Linux Driver For Their Halo Box: For Its RGB LED Light Bar
AMD CEO Lisa Su back at CES 2026 showed off the Ryzen AI Halo box as a mini PC built around their excellent Strix Halo SoC. The Ryzen AI halo box is to serve as an AI development platform to compete with the likes of NVIDIA’s DGX Spark and Dell GB10. This week is the first time I am seeing new Linux driver activity specifically referencing this exciting AMD “Halo Box” system… ⌘ Read more

Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus
Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today… ⌘ Read more

IBM Updates Linux Patches For Introducing ARM64 KVM Virtualization On s390
At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on “dual architecture” hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Leads Over Windows 11 In Creator Workstation Performance
The past few weeks I have been testing out the new HP Z6 G5 A workstation desktop PC. It’s a beast in being powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX, eight channels of DDR5-5600 memory, and paired with a NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation graphics card. The full review on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation will be published on Phoronix in the next week or so but given the timing and that it shipped with WIndows 11 Pro, here is a look at … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s Lemonade SDK 10.3 Now 10x Smaller By Getting Rid Of Electron
Lemonade as the open-source local AI server backed by AMD and supported across AMD CPUs / GPUs / NPUs on Windows and Linux is out with a big update… ⌘ Read more

Sovereign Tech Agency Launches New Initiative To Help Open Standards
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards… ⌘ Read more

GCC 16’s Improved Error Messages, Experimental HTML Output
GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is releasing as soon as later this week if all goes well. Among the many improvements in this year’s open-source compiler update are continued enhancements to the error messages as well as having an experimental HTML output option for messages… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Released For Living On The Leading-Edge Of Linux Innovations
Fedora 44 is officially released for providing the very latest Linux innovations with GNOME 50 being the default desktop of Fedora Workstation 44, an improved KDE experience with Plasma 6.6 complete with the Plasma Log-in Manager, and other up-to-date software packages… ⌘ Read more

Proton 11.0 Beta 2 Updates VKD3D-Proton
Following the release of Proton 11.0 Beta 1 from two weeks ago that updated against Wine 11.0, this heart to Valve’s Steam Play is now out with a second beta release… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu’s “AI Kill Switch” Is Achieved By Removing Snaps, Initially Opt-In
Following yesterday’s polarizing news of Canonical to begin shipping AI features in Ubuntu Linux over the course of the next year, Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical has now provided some clarifications around their AI plans… ⌘ Read more

AMDXDNA Driver Preps Hardware Scheduler Time Quantum For Ryzen AI Multi-User Fairness
The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs is preparing a new feature called hardware scheduler time quantum for ensuring fairness between multiple users/contexts wanting to leverage this neural processing unit for AI workloads… ⌘ Read more

7-Zip 26.01 Now Allows Making Use Of Huge Pages On Linux For Faster Compression
7-Zip 26.01 was released on Monday and making this release significant are huge pages support on Linux and some users may be interested in the new options around the path generation mode for the output directory when extracting archives… ⌘ Read more

WayVNC 0.10 Released For Advancing This Leading VNC Server For Wayland
WayVNC 0.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server that works with Wayland compositors leveraging the wlroots library… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat’s Stratis Storage 3.9 Released With Online Encryption/Decryption/Reencryption
It’s crazy to realize it has been ten years already since Red Hat abandoned their Btrfs plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and dropped it, which was a technology preview feature since RHEL6. In its place Red Hat engineers began developing Stratis for next-gen Linux storage with ZFS/Btrfs-like features but instead building atop XFS, LUKS, Device Mapper, and Clevis. After a while since the last major release, Stratis Storage 3 … ⌘ Read more

RADV Vulkan Driver Adds Memory Protection Using AMD Trusted Memory Zone
The newest Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” feature enabled by AMD engineers is protected memory support using the Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) support on newer GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Valve Confirms Steam Controller Release Date, $99 Price
Valve just announced that their new Steam Controller will be going on sale on 4 May. Pricing in the US is at $99 USD… ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus Provides Exceptional Value For Linux Users
After looking at the new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor earlier this month with its nice performance evolution for Arrow Lake on Linux, today we are looking at the other new Intel desktop CPU offering: the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus that retails for just $219 USD. ⌘ Read more

With Linux 7.1 The Mainline Kernel Now Supports Real-Time “RT” On ARM
The Linux 7.1 mainline kernel will allow building a real-time “PREEMPT_RT” kernel for the ARM architecture with no longer needing any out-of-tree patches… ⌘ Read more

XWayland 24.1.11 Brings Crash Fixes
Red Hat’s Olivier Fourdan announced today the availability of XWayland 24.1.11 that brings a few bug/regression fixes… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Linux Will Begin Landing AI Features Throughout The Next Year
Now that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has shipped, Canonical is opening up on their next major focus for Ubuntu development: lots of AI features… ⌘ Read more

AMD VPE 2.0 Support Merged For Mesa 26.2
Merged overnight to the latest Mesa graphics driver development code is enabling the VPE 2.0 engine to be found with future AMD Radeon GPUs… ⌘ Read more