SDL3 Ported To HarmonyOS / OpenHarmony
The SDL3 library commonly used for games and applications for cross-platform hardware and software abstractions now has upstream support for Huawei’s HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Set To Deliver Better Performance For Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake
While Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is working fine out-of-the-box on new Intel Core 3 “Wildcat Lake” laptops like the CHUWI UniBook, next month’s release of Ubuntu 26.10 will help deliver better performance out of these low-cost laptop options. ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Beta Released With KMSCON Console, GNOME 51 & Other Updates
The beta release of Fedora 45 is out today and right on schedule for this wonderful Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Java 27 Reaches GA With The G1 Garbage Collector By Default Everywhere
Oracle christened Java 27 today with the OpenJDK 27 release reaching general availability (GA) status… ⌘ Read more

Sound Open Firmware 2.15 Released With AMD ACP 7.x Support, Intel UAOL
Sound Open Firmware as the open-source, vendor-independent audio DSP firmware stack and driver framework is out today with a new feature update… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 157 Beta Released With Latest Enhancements
The Firefox release train keeps on rolling. With Firefox 156 released, Firefox 157 is now in beta ahead of the planned release coming up at the end of September… ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patches Improving Hibernation Speed In 2026
A new patch series being worked on is enhancing the Linux kernel’s hibernation allocator to allow for faster performance when hibernating the system… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Desktop Overhauled On Raspberry Pi OS, Adds Icon Dock
The Raspberry Pi Desktop on Raspberry Pi OS has seen a major overhaul to better modernize the desktop computing experience on the ARM64 single board computers… ⌘ Read more

OpenAPV Sees Big Update For Advancing The Advanced Professional Video Codec
OpenAPV as the open-source reference implementation of the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec today saw its v1.1.1 release, succeeding v0.3.0 as the prior release… ⌘ Read more

AMD Preparing Linux For Enhanced SMT Protection “ESMTP” For EPYC VMs
AMD engineers today sent out patches on the Linux kernel mailing list for beginning to enable Enhanced SMT Protection “ESMTP” for better security with virtual machines running atop EPYC server processors with SEV-SNP… ⌘ Read more

GNU Coreutils 9.12 Released With Performance Optimizations, New uname Option
GNU Coreutils 9.12 released today with a mix of fixes, some new options, and various performance improvements to these widely-used set of core system utilities… ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Steam Frame Now Available At $1059+ USD
Valve just announced their long-awaited Steam Frame headset is now available… ⌘ Read more

Rustls 0.23.45 Released To Fix Two Year Old Security Issue
While the Rustls modern TLS library is written in the Rust programming language with a focus on memory safety, as we’ve seen out of other Rust project re-implementations in the past, the new implementations can lead to other security bugs of their own. Out today is Rustls 0.23.45 to fix a security issue introduced back in 2024 with Rustls while the likes of OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and others are unaffected… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 156 Available With Its Built-In PDF Viewer Starting Up To 45% Faster
Mozilla today published their Firefox 156.0 release binaries ahead of the official Tuesday announcement… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Delivering Some Performance Gains On Intel Panther Lake / Framework Laptop 13 Pro
Linux 7.1 brought some performance improvements for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake”, Linux 7.2 enhanced the performance for the integrated Arc B390 Xe3 graphics, and now for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel are various performance improvements at large. Today’s article is looking at the performance of the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel compared to Linux 7.2 stable using the Core Ultra X9 388H within the Framewo … ⌘ Read more

Removing Drivers For Outdated ARM Platforms Will Lighten The Kernel By ~247k Lines
The Linux kernel is going to see the removal of a number of recently deprecated ARM 32-bit platforms. Following the deprecation in Linux 7.3, removing the old ARM platforms will lighten the kernel by around 55k lines of code. But removing now unused drivers only relevant to those platforms will mean roughly a quarter million lines of code can be removed from the kernel source tree… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Could End Up Seeing Kernel Builds ~36% Faster, Incremental Builds ~70% Faster
Earlier this month I wrote about a patch series posted to the Linux kernel mailing list that addressed a lot of “hideous code” to make Linux kernel builds faster. A number of single-threaded bottlenecks were tracked down and fixed within the Linux kernel thanks to the assistance of AI. A second revision of those patches hit the mailing list this morning and there is hope they could be upstreamed for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patched For Silent User-Space Data Loss Bug That’s Existed Since 2023
Being merged after yesterday’s Linux 7.3-rc3 release was an important fix for addressing a silent, user-space data loss bug that has existed in the kernel the past three years… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc3 Released: “Another Fairly Large RC”
Out today is the third weekly release candidate of Linux 7.3 as this next kernel version works its way toward a stable release in the second half of October… ⌘ Read more

Zstd Improvement For Linux 7.4 To Avoid Redundant Initialization
In addition to Usama Arif’s recent Linux patches for addressing a major inefficiency within the Linux kernel’s Zstd compression code, he also has a separate patch series destined for Linux 7.4 to further enhance the Zstd compression/decompression performance by avoiding redundant initialization… ⌘ Read more

BFS File-System Being Removed For Linux 7.4
The latest upstream file-system to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel is… BFS… ⌘ Read more

ARCTIC’s Fan Controller Driver For Linux Being Dual-Licensed With BSD-2-Clause
Earlier this year ARCTIC published a fan controller driver for Linux. Besides being rare for an enthusiast-oriented company to publish a Linux driver themselves where typically it’s left up to the open-source community for driver support for such peripherals, it was all the more interesting as they published the Linux driver and got it mainlined before the product was even released. In the end the ARTCIC Fan Controller is the best des … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Shotwell 33 Photo Manager Released With GTK4 Port
It’s been quite some time since hearing any news out of the Shotwell photo manager project for GNOME, but out today is Shotwell 33 with the long-awaited GTK4 port… ⌘ Read more

EROFS Disables LZ4 Rolling Decompression Due To Data Corruption Possibility
The EROFS read-only file-system popular for embedded systems, containers, and other use-cases has resorted to temporarily disabling its LZ4 rolling decompression support due to data corruption concerns… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13.7 Released With Many Bug Fixes
For those wanting the freshest Debian 13 “Trixie” install media, Debian 13.7 is out today in bundling up all the latest bug and security fixes… ⌘ Read more

Void Linux Maintainer Orphans 100+ Packages Over AI Policy Dispute
A Void Linux maintainer has orphaned more than 100 packages he maintained over a dispute of the project’s AI policy for LLM-generated text… ⌘ Read more

Intel Reverses Decision To Cancel Their Open-Source Font Project
Amid Intel cutting back on open-source projects over the past two years as cost cutting measures at the company, their latest open-source project on the chopping block was the peculiar font they developed a few years back. The project was archived this week only to change course two days later… ⌘ Read more

GTK 4.24 Released With Better Fractional Scaling, More Precise GDK Frame-Clock
GTK 4.24 released on Friday as the newest stable feature release to the GTK4 toolkit. It’s quite a nice update to GTK4 for pairing with next week’s GNOME 51 desktop release… ⌘ Read more

Intel Linux NPU Driver Only Now Officially Supports Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
Releasing on Friday was the Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.38 as the user-space open-source driver components for leveraging the Core Ultra Neural Processing Unit (NPU) under Linux in conjunction with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Developers Contemplate Linux Firmware HWE Package
A possible future enhancement being considered for Ubuntu Long Term Support “LTS” releases is the introduction of a linux-firmware-hwe package as part of their hardware enablement (HWE) stack… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Remote Desktop To Enjoy Lower Latency Performance
Along with KDE Plasma 6.8 beta releasing this week, there were some other interesting Plasma changes this week worthy of a shout-out… ⌘ Read more

Gitte As Git Client For GNOME Continues Maturing Quite Nicely
For those in pursuit of a graphical Git client for GNOME or the Linux desktop at large, the GTK4-powered Gitte continues advancing rather well and out this week is its v0.10 release… ⌘ Read more

New Cache Aware Scheduling Fixes Out For Testing
Since being merged back during the Linux 7.2 cycle, the Cache Aware Scheduling code continues seeing more fixes as users test out this scheduling enhancement on different processors and system configurations… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s IO_uring Sees Some “Crazy” Patches That Deliver Very Nice Improvements
Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe continues to uncover new opportunities for making the wonderful IO_uring framework even more performant within the Linux kernel. For ending out the week he’s posted some “crazy” patches delivering some significant gains… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS vs. Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS On Intel Wildcat Lake + 8GB RAM
Often times when testing different Linux distributions or comparing Windows vs. Linux it’s on leading flagship desktop or server hardware, but today we are looking at the Ubuntu vs. CachyOS vs. Windows performance at the opposite end of the spectrum. With the new CHUWI UniBook $449 laptop powered by Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake and with 8GB of system memory, here is a look at how those three operating systems compare across a variety of … ⌘ Read more

Mold High Speed Linker Being Rewritten In Rust, Hopes To Be The Default Linker On Linux
The Mold high performance linker that typically outperforms the likes of LLVM lld, GNU LD, Wild, and others is being rewritten in the Rust programming language and also has an ambitious goal of being adopted as the default linker on Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Prominent Mesa Developer Now Working For Arm On PanVK & Panfrost Code
Erik Faye-Lund who has contributed to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack working on areas like Zink and most notably the PanVK Vulkan and Panfrost Gallium3D drivers forr Arm Mali hardware is now working directly for Arm… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Debuts Xepub As New EPUB Reader, Clockenstein Calendar App
The Linux Mint project today published their August 2026 development report, including some new applications added to their XApp collection… ⌘ Read more

Patches Ready For AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Enabled By Default With Linux 7.4 With FreeSync, VRR & ALLM
Linux 7.4 is now set to reach the elusive milestone of HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. After the HDMI Forum previously rejected HDMI 2.1 for the AMDGPU open-source driver implementation going back years, earlier this year something changed – widely speculated to be with Valve’s involvement – that HDMI 2.1 patches began appearing for the AMDGPU driver. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle, the b … ⌘ Read more

Git 2.56-rc0 Released With Updated Contribution Guidelines, Improvements For Swift
While still ultimately working toward Git 3.0 with SHA-256 hashes by default and the “main” branch name by default, among other breaking changes (and potentially coming around the end of 2026), Git 2.56-rc0 is now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

Intel Thermald 2.5.13 Restores Accidentally Deleted Wildcat Lake Support
Intel’s Thermald released on Thursday as the newest update to this daemon for thermal monitoring on Intel hardware that was also recently extended for beginning to support Qualcomm/ARM hardware too. The main change with Thermald 2.5.13 is adding back Intel Wildcat Lake platform support after it was accidentally removed in the prior release… ⌘ Read more

GCC 13.5 Released With 265+ Bug Fixes
For those continuing to rely on the GCC 13 compiler in production that debuted more than three years ago, GCC 13.5 released today with more than 265 bug fixes. GCC 13.5 also caps off the GCC 13 series as the last planned point release… ⌘ Read more

BeOS-Inspired Haiku Now Supports Changing Audio Outputs Live, Other Improvements
In addition to August bringing the long-awaited Haiku R1 Beta 6 release, there was also a lot of development progress on this BeOS-inspired operating system too during the course of the past month… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2.6 Released With Some Early Preparations Toward Eventual GTK4 Port
The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release for transitioning from GTK2 to GTK3 only saw its stable release last year. But with GTK4 already being out for years, GIMP developers have begun making some very early preparations toward an inevitable GTK4 port… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.3 RADV + RadeonSI Ready With DRM Format Modifiers For Older AMD GPUs
Coming with Linux 7.3 is DRM format modifiers for GFX6 through GFX8 era GPUs covering the original Raddeon HD 7000 (GCN 1.0) graphics cards up through the Polaris and Fiji series. This work by Valve’s Timur Kristóf is necessary for these older GPUs to support Vulkan-based Wayland compositors, better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan or other APis, compositors running on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, and o … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS Released With Linux 7.0 HWE Stack
For those continuing to make use of the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support “LTS” series, Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS is out today as the newest point release… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xeon 600 Workstation Performance vs. AMD Threadripper 9000 In Nearly 400 Benchmarks
Last month I had the chance to test the Xeon 678X workstation processor as my first hands-on opportunity with the Xeon 600 “Granite Rapids WS” series. The Intel Xeon 678X was within the HP Z4 G6i workstation and used it for a number of different benchmarks. In that HP workstation review were also some comparison points to the likes of AMD Ryzen Threadripper while in this article are some much more concentrated … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta Released With Many Great Improvements, Kup Backup Scheduler
Ahead of the stable release of Plasma 6.8 due out on 14 October that also marks the 30th anniversary of the KDE project, out today is the much anticipated beta release… ⌘ Read more

Intel BFF Driver Slated For Linux 7.4 Introduction
Last month I covered Intel posting a new driver named “BFF” for the Linux kernel. This BFF driver is for a new hardware feature debuting with next-gen Diamond Rapids processors for better dealing with aging CPU silicon where some bits may become stuck over time… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA NVK Driver Lands Improvement To Help With Valve’s Gamescope
Merged today for next quarter’s Mesa 26.3 release is an improvement for the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver. This latest NVK improvement benefits usage of Valve’s Gamescope micro-compositor and should help with performance during game recording and remote play… ⌘ Read more