Linux 7.4 Showing Few Performance Gains With Initial Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
In the first round of benchmarking the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel there are some performance improvements – and some small regressions – worth noting over the current Linux 7.3 stable kernel. This first round of Linux 7.4 kernel benchmarking was on a System76 Thelio Major workstation with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X. ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 620.70.06 Linux Driver Released With Wayland Fixes & Performance Work
Out today is the first NVIDIA Linux driver release in the R620 release branch. This NVIDIA 620.70.06 Linux driver release isn’t too feature heavy but comes with some bug fixes, improved performance of explicit sync on Wayland, and some other refinements… ⌘ Read more

Debian’s APT Affected By Man-In-The-Middle Attack For Arbitrary Code Execution As Root
A new vulnerability was disclosed today affecting Debian’s APT package manager where a man-in-the-middle attacker could carry out arbitrary code execution as root… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Will More Than Likely Be This Year’s LTS Kernel
While the Linux 7.4 kernel will be released in the 2026 calendar year in the last week or two of December if the schedule holds, it turns out Linux 7.3 is likely to be this year’s Long Term Support kernel version… ⌘ Read more

systemd With Its Initial Support For Rust
Systemd recently merged support for Rust programs. This initial systemd Rust support is limited to leaf components / individual binaries while eventually they hope to be able to support Rust within root components of systemd. More details on this initiative were shared this week… ⌘ Read more

Synaptics Appears To Use Legal Threats To Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver
From earlier in the year you may recall a new experimental open-source Linux driver for modern DisplayLink hardware. That “Vino” driver for DisplayLink driver was a clean-room reverse-engineered DisplayLink driver that was developed in part by AI and written in Rust. Unfortunately, that open-source driver has disappeared following legal threats by Synaptics… ⌘ Read more

“AMD Loves Omarchy” Linux With More Collaboration Coming
In addition to organizations like Alibaba, SpaceXSI, DigitalOcean, Meta SuperIntelligence Labs, and others contributing millions of dollars toward the development of the Omarchy Linux distribution, it turns out AMD also has a thing for this Linux distribution built around the Hyprland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Experimental Project Gets Intel XeSS On XMX Working With Valve’s Steam Play (Proton)
Last month I wrote about Intel working on adding proper XeSS support to Steam Play (Proton). While those efforts haven’t yet been completed for benefiting Linux gamers running Intel Arc Graphics, in the meantime an independent open-source developer has managed to get XMX-accelerated XeSS working under Proton… ⌘ Read more

AMD Releases ZenDNN 6.1 With New Kernels & Optimizations
Last month Intel and AMD jointly announced they would be collaborating on software optimizations with PyTorch/oneDNN. That already led to the UXL Foundation’s release of oneDNN 3.14 with initial AMD Zen optimizations. It looks though like for now at least AMD will also continue to concurrently push new work into their ZenDNN library and not exclusively tied to oneDNN. Out today is ZenDNN 6.1… ⌘ Read more

Domicile Desktop Brings Web Technologies To Building Wayland Desktops
Domicile is a new Wayland compositor that leverages Chromium for allowing custom Linux desktops to be built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2.8 Released With Many Refinements, Numerous Security Fixes Due To AI Reports
GIMP 3.2.8 is out today as the newest stable release of this open-source image editing application that’s most popular on the Linux desktop… ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 11.1 Released With Security Fixes & Other Improvements
Following the release of NetBSD 11.0 in August, NetBSD 11.1 is out today with a collection of security fixes and other improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Features Steam Frame VR Headset, More AMD Zen 6 Enablement & Initial Apple M4 / A18 Pro Bring-Up
The Linux 7.4 kernel is hopefully going to be this year’s Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version and is coming jam-packed with new features and changes. ⌘ Read more

RadeonSI & RADV Now Enabling D16 Support For GFX8 Era GPUs
Thanks to the latest work by Georg Lehmann of Valve’s Linux graphics team, the AMD GFX8 generation of GPUs that stretch from GCN Volcanic Islands through Polaris GPUs is still seeing improved Linux support. The latest work to land and benefiting both RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan is enabling D16 support… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Released With Many Leading-Edge Linux Innovations
After challenged by two release delays, Fedora 45 is officially out as the latest six-month update to this leading Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Linux Preparing Faster FAT32 Performance In 2027 With Up To 4.06x Improvement
In addition to some significant performance improvements for FAT32 in Linux 7.4, more performance improvements are on the way. For what will likely land in Linux 7.5 is up to a 4.06x improvement demonstrated for this aging file-system… ⌘ Read more

openSUSE Leap 16.1 Released With Immutable Sever Integration
The openSUSE Leap 16.1 Linux distribution is out today and built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1… ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Preparing To Remove The Last Of Its MMX Optimized Code
For what will likely be merged to the Linux 7.5 kernel, the mainline kernel is preparing to drop its last optimization its been carrying for far outdated MMX processors. This affects the likes of Intel Pentium MMX and Pentium II processors running modern software with up-to-date kernels when Linux 7.5 is released in 2027… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime Continues Prepping For GPU D Series, OpenCL LEO for Nova Lake P
Released today was the Intel Compute Runtime 26.40.40196.8 as the newest version of their open-source GPU compute stack for both Windows and Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

SUSE Laying Off 10% Of Its Workforce Due To AI & Automation
Bavarian-based enterprise Linux distribution vendor SUSE is laying off 10% of its global workforce as a result of AI and automation… ⌘ Read more

GCC 17 Compiler Merges Support For AVX10V1AUX
Landing today into the GCC 17 compiler codebase is initial support for AVX10V1AUX as the auxillary updates to AVX10.1 that are out of the cross-vendor AI Compute Extensions “ACE” initiative between AMD and Intel… ⌘ Read more

Intel Brings RPL-M/RPL-P SoundWire To Upstream Linux For Raptor Lake Powered Automobiles
Intel today posted a set of patches for bringing SoundWire support in the upstream Intel AVS driver for Raptor Lake. While Intel SoundWire activities are not new, I was curious to see them focusing on Raptor Lake improvements in 2026 for what will then go into a 2027 Linux kernel version… ⌘ Read more

AerynOS 2026.11 Released With New Installer Option, Other Improvements
AerynOS 2026.11 was released today along with a lengthy blog post highlighting the recent development work on this original Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Radeon RADV Vulkan Driver Adopts An LLM Policy
The Mesa RADV driver that provides Vulkan API support for AMD Radeon GPUs on Linux has adopted its own policy around AI / large language models (LLMs) for code contributions… ⌘ Read more

FreeRDP 3.33 Released With WebAssembly Support, Huge Influx Of Activity Due To AI
The FreeRDP 3.33 software released today as the newest version of this open-source Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation… ⌘ Read more

KDE Linux Nearing Its Beta Milestone, Now Ships With NTSYNC By Default
KDE developer Nate Graham published his monthly blog post on Sunday to outline the current state of KDE Linux and some of the changes made to this in-house Linux distribution over the course of October. Additionally, KDE Linux is nearing its beta milestone after beinbg in development for over one year as a reference Linux distribution for KDE… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Price Rises To $385 USD
Raspberry Pi announced their latest round of price hikes as a result of the RAM shortages and increased pricing continuing to affect the industry… ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Just Under 4% For October 2026
Valve just published their Steam Survey results for October and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use on a relative basis… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4-rc1 Released With Nice Performance Improvements, AMD Ryzen Zen 6 Preparations & AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Default
Even with Linus Torvalds having been on holiday, Linux 7.4-rc1 is out today on-schedule for capping off the Linux 7.4 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Kwi Being Developed As New KDE Terminal Emulator With 3x To 35x Performance
A new KDE terminal emulator is in development as a modern alternative to Konsole. Kwi is this new terminal app being built atop the Ghostty library… ⌘ Read more

The Linux 7.4 Merge Window Is Easily The Largest In Kernel History
After writing this morning with some stats about the size of the Linux 7.4 merge window and the kernel’s source tree approaching 42 million lines, I was curious to run some numbers for putting the size of the merge window into perspective against the major kernel releases of the past 15 years. This shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity… ⌘ Read more

OverlayFS Sees Many Fixes Thanks To AI Code Review
Merged this weekend for Linux 7.4 and also marked for back-porting to current stable kernel versions are a number of fixes to the OverlayFS union mount file-system… ⌘ Read more

AI Use In The Linux Kernel, Microsoft Defender On Linux & Other October Highlights
October brought the releases of Linux 7.3, Ubuntu 26.10, the KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop, and a wealth of other open-source software releases. The expanding use of AI/LLMs within Linux kernel development also made for interesting discussions in October. Microsoft bringing their Defender software to the Linux desktop was perhaps the biggest surprise out of October. Here is a look back at the past month… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s Perf Python Scripts More Robust & Faster With Linux 7.4
Merged this weekend to Linux 7.4 Git were all of the perf subsystem tooling updates. Most notable to these tooling updates for dealing with performance counters and more on Linux is an overhaul to the Python code… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Merge Window Saw Nearly 20k Commits, Source Tree Approaching 42 Million Lines
Linux 7.3 started out just under 41 million lines in total in the kernel source tree. In the end the Linux v7.3 tag came in at 41,019,555 lines as measured by cloc while now with Linux 7.4 we are inching ever closer to 42 million lines. On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record… ⌘ Read more

Brief Server Downtime Expected Tonight
Just a friendly heads up that Phoronix.com and associated sites will be down briefly at around midnight PST / 3AM EST on 1 November for a failed drive in the NVMe SSD RAID array… ⌘ Read more

OpenShot 4.1 Released With Auto-Optimize, CLI Automation & ARM64 Linux Builds
OpenShot is closing out the month of October by releasing OpenShot 4.1 as the latest major feature release for this useful open-source video editing solution… ⌘ Read more

Enlightenment 0.28 Released With Many Improvements
Enlightenment 0.27 released at the beginning of 2025 and since then there’s been no major feature update, falling off their roughly 12 month release cadence. But out this Halloween is Enlightenment 0.28 now with the better part of two years worth of changes… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Developing New Apps For Terminal & System Monitoring
Linux Mint is out with their October 2026 status report to outline various initiatives they have underway in their lead-up to the Linux Mint 27 stable release happening on/around Christmas… ⌘ Read more

New Linux 7.4 Feature For Reducing AI Noise Already Reverted Due To A “Crazy Beast”
A new feature merged last week for Linux 7.4 to help reduce AI/LLM generated noise from invalid/irrelevant testing configurations is now reverted due to a “crazy beast” in the VFIO subsystem… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.9 Lands Some New Performance Optimizations
I love a good performance optimization and there are several this week in the KDE space with Plasma 6.9 development heating up… ⌘ Read more

Ceph In Linux 7.4 Adds Global Mount Option For Lazy I/O
The Ceph kernel client changes have been submitted for Linux 7.4 ahead of its merge window expected to wrap up on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.3 Brings Nice Improvements For Linux Gamers On Latest NVIDIA Drivers
DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.3 is out this weekend as a new feature update to this NVIDIA NVAPI implementation used by Valve as part of Steam Play with Proton for nicely integrating NVIDIA technologies into various Windows games running on Linux… ⌘ Read more

CUDA Oxide 0.3 Vastly Improves Rust Support For NVIDIA CUDA Programming
NVIDIA software engineers released CUDA Oxide 0.3 for closing out October. CUDA Oxide as a reminder is their experimental Rust to CUDA compiler that has been seeing a lot of activity in recent months… ⌘ Read more

Sculpt OS 26.10 Released - Now Powered By Genode’s Custom Microkernel
Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system project born out of the Genode initiative is now using the project’s own microkernel rather than a third-party microkernel… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.21 Released With Better WoW64 OpenGL Performance
Wine 11.21 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine and as we near Wine 12.0 stable release happenings getting underway in about one month with the official v12.0 release expected early in the new year… ⌘ Read more

PostgreSQL 19 Running Behind Schedule Due To AI/LLM Burden
The PostgreSQL database server typically sees its annual feature release every September~October, but it’s not coming until at least November if not longer this year. Due to the increased developer burden due to increased bug reporting and patches via AI/LLM activity, the PostgreSQL developers have been overwhelmed… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 27.04 “Tenacious T-Rex” Opens For Development
Following this month’s release of Ubuntu 26.10, Ubuntu 27.04 development formally got underway today… ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen Zen 6 Looks Like It Will Be In Good Shape With Linux 7.4, Laptop Improvements
The x86 platform driver changes were merged this week to the Linux 7.4 kernel ahead of the merge window closing this weekend… ⌘ Read more

Another Week, Another Vibe Coded OS; Closed-Source In The Name Of Security
With today’s AI/LLM capabilities, there is almost a new operating system heard about each week “coded from scratch” predominantly via AI agents. This week was no exception with another project hitting our email inbox. Though most of them are open-source, this one is closed-source in the name of security… ⌘ Read more