KDE Plasma 6.8 Introducing New kscreenctl Tool
KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.14 Brings WoW64 Mode To FreeBSD, Icon Support In Start Menu
Wine 11.14 was tagged today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Debian Considering General Resolution Over LLM Usage In The Project
Debian developers are discussing a general resolution whether to permit AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian software project… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm Committed To Six Week Release Cycle Moving Forward
One of many interesting takeaways from this week’s AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm QCE Driver On The Chopping Block With ~48x Slower Than Armv8 Crypto Extensions
A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as “broken” and “harmful” due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine “QCE” driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it’s even worse than anticipated… ⌘ Read more

Imagination PowerVR Driver Marking BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU As Supported In Linux 7.3
Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Linux Looking To Get Rid Of /etc/debian_version Historical Artifact
Ubuntu Linux has shipped /etc/debian_version that is carried over from upstream Debian and in turn just indicating the Debian Sid development version from which the packages are arrived. Besides it being inaccurate, /etc/os-release has been the long preferred standard for reading the OS release information. Thus finally Ubuntu developers are looking at dropping the /etc/debian_version file… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Looks To Begin Phasing Out In-Kernel Crypto Userspace API
Going along with the upstream Linux 7.2 kernel deprecation of AF_ALG and Linux 7.3 to further restrict this interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API, Fedora 45 is looking to follow and help support this transition… ⌘ Read more

AMD Advancing AI 2026: Open, Open-Source & More Open-Source
At this week’s AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, “AI” was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was “open”… Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I’d wager at this year’s AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and open standards. Certainly seemed like an uptick in “open” men … ⌘ Read more

Snapdragon X Elite Laptop Experience Still Lackluster On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I’ve been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite SoC to see how its performing under … ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC Zen 7 “Florence” Confirmed With ACE, Next-Gen Memory
After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 “Venice” processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 “Florence” details as well as EPYC Zen 8 “Ravenna” being in development… ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces ROCm.AI As AI-Driven Platform For Developers
In addition to Instinct MI455X and Helios launching along with the new AMD EPYC 9006 “Venice” processors, AMD used their annual Advancing AI day to announce ROCm.AI as an AI-driven platform for developers… ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC 9006 Venice Announced & Looks Poised To Be A Grand Slam
While AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” launched just under two years ago, it has aged remarkably well. It is one of the few CPU generations in my past 22 years of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking that has still captivated me two years on in finding still typically industry-leading performance across varying workloads, exceptional reliability, and all around a very robust platform. Today though at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su formally announced EPYC 9006 “Ve … ⌘ Read more

AMD Launches Instinct MI455X, Helios AI Rack
Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI 2026 just launched the new Instinct MI455X GPUs and the Helios rack… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Ports Currently Frozen Due To A Very Large Commit
The FreeBSD project issued a statement today over the FreeBSD Ports repository having been frozen for the past two days. The freeze is not due to a malicious compromise but rather a very large commit breaking things… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Atomic Desktops Look To Allow For Web-Based Remote Installations
One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora Linux 45 is for supporting web-based remote installations of Fedora Atomic Desktop images… ⌘ Read more

Ryzen AI Software 1.8 Released With New Model Support, More Optimizations
Ahead of Lisa Su’s keynote this morning at the AMD Advancing AI event, tagged on GitHub just now was the Ryzen AI Software 1.8 release for helping to deploy AI models on Ryzen AI PCs… ⌘ Read more

LLVM 23.1-rc1 Released With AMD Zen 6 & AVX-512 BMM Support, Other Compiler Enhancements
Following the recent code branching for the LLVM 23 series, LLVM 23.1-rc1 was released today in working toward the next stable release of this open-source compiler stack… ⌘ Read more

dav1d 1.5.4 Brings AV1 Decoding To OS/2
While the VideoLAN developers are busy these days working on dav2d for AV2 video decoding, they haven’t let up work on dav1d and recently released dav1d 1.5.4 for continuing to enhance this leading open-source, CPU-based AV1 decoder… ⌘ Read more

Lemonade 11.5 Local AI Server Released With Completed Lemonade Router
Just one week after releasing Lemonade 11.0, the Lemonade 11.5 local AI server was released today for this open-source AMD backed project during their AMD Advancing AI event… ⌘ Read more

SDL Lands HDR10 Rendering Support
Sam Lantinga of Valve and SDL fame has landed HDR10 rendering support into the Simple DirectMedia Library… ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.4 Released With More Fixes, Force Quit For COSMIC Monitor
System76 developers today released COSMIC Epoch 1.4 as the newest stable release to their Rust-based desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC Turin With PCIe 5.0 Storage Shows Off Nice Gains On Linux 7.2
Earlier this week was an exciting look at Intel Xe3 graphics performance gains on Linux 7.2 with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” hardware. On the other side of the table, with AMD hardware on this forthcoming kernel an area to be excited about are some I/O improvements at least for 5th Gen EPYC with speedy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage. ⌘ Read more

libx11-compat Is Working To Implement Xlib Atop SDL For Wayland, macOS, Android
For helping to keep X11 clients running in a modern Linux desktop world with Wayland or even for running on macOS or Android, there is now yet-another option being developed with libx11-compat. The libx11-compat project is working to re-implement the Xlib client library atop SDL2/SDL3 interfaces for allow broad underlying platform coverage… ⌘ Read more

Intel Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts Slated For Linux 7.3
Back in March Intel software engineers began sending out Linux patches for Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts as a new capability with recent Intel processors. This notable efficiency improvement is now queued for introduction in the Linux 7.3 cycle once its merge window opens in a month… ⌘ Read more

The “New Normal” Of Audio Quirks Submitted For Linux 7.2-rc5
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE sent out this week’s batch of sound fixes that he describes as “A collection of fixes that have been accumulated recently. The amount is still “new normal”, but all small fixes. Mostly hardware-specific quirks, but including a few core fixes, too.” The “new normal” has been a common phrase recently to reflect the increased tempo of patches as well as security/bug disclosures all due to the increased … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 10-Inch Model Launches
Following the launch of the 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 and the 5-inch display variant, Raspberry Pi announced today the addition of a 10-inch model… ⌘ Read more

Cryptsetup 2.8.7 Released To Deal With Fallout Of Linux’s Rushed AF_ALG Deprecation
Linux’s cryptsetup for configuring and managing encrypted storage devices is ready with a new version as the developers work to deal with the recent deprecation of the Linux AF_ALG interface… ⌘ Read more

Three New Ubuntu Snap Vulnerabilities Made Public - One Dates Back To Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Canonical today disclosed three new Snap security vulnerabilities affecting snapd. Two are rated high impact vulnerabilities while the third is considered medium but covers all Ubuntu releases of the past decade going back to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For X2 Elite Extreme Powered ASUS Zenbook A16
Following recent Linux kernel patches enabling the Snapdragon X2 Elite powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 and HP EliteBook X G2q X2 Elite laptops to boot outside of Windows 11 on ARM, Qualcomm engineers have now posted a new patch series for getting the X2 Elite Extreme powered ASUS Zenbook A16 working on Linux… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 vs. GNOME Shell 50.3 vs. Xfce 4.20 On CachyOS With NVIDIA Graphics
Earlier this month I provided a look at the KDE Plasma 6.7 Wayland vs. X11 session performance for graphics/gaming on CachyOS using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics. Since then Phoronix readers – including some premium supporters – requested seeing some additional desktops tested with the latest CachyOS packages. So here we are now with seeing how KDE Plasma 6.7 compared to the Wayland-only GNOME Shell 50.3 desktop as well as th … ⌘ Read more

Canonical Makes The “Enterprise Store” Official For Offline/Air-Gapped Ubuntu Usage
For months the Enterprise Store “enterprise-store” has been mentioned in some Ubuntu documentation and other elements while today it was formally announced by Canonical. The Enterprise Store is for helping to manage Ubuntu Linux deployments particularly within enterprise organizations that may have their computers air-gapped or otherwise strict Internet controls… ⌘ Read more

Stratis Storage Anaconda Integration Approved For Fedora 45
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the latest batch of features for the upcoming Fedora 45 release… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS “Open-Source Windows” Project Now Capable Of Running Half-Life 2
One month ago it was exciting to see the open-source ReactOS operating system running Valve’s Half-Life game. Little to realize less than 30 days later it would also be running Half-Life 2… ⌘ Read more

AMD Begins Staging Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 7.3
In addition to Intel beginning to volley graphics driver patches for Linux 7.3, this week AMD also began sending out their pull requests of “new stuff” to DRM-Next for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preparing Linux For IPU8 Web Camera Support With Nova Lake Laptops
More Linux kernel patches have been surfacing that confirm next-gen, high-end Nova Lake laptops will feature IPU8 image processing capabilities… ⌘ Read more

OpenRazer 3.12.4 Fixes Compatibility With Linux 7.2
OpenRazer 3.12.4 is now available as the newest update to these out-of-tree, unofficial Linux drivers for Razer devices. OpenRazer when paired with the likes of Polychromatic or other GUI options is what makes for a nice experience running Razer gaming peripherals under Linux… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2607 Optimizing For Yet-To-Be-Released ARM 256-bit SVE2 Hardware
The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more optimizations and improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux DRM Scheduler Patches Yield Massive Improvement For Job Submission Latency
A set of patches to the Linux kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) scheduler that is shared among different kernel graphics drivers is showing the potential of delivering much lower job submission latency when the system is loaded with many runnable CPU processes… ⌘ Read more

4K @ 60 FPS USB Video Capture Finally Becomes Less Problematic On Linux
One area of Linux hardware testing I haven’t explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Phoronix Premium Summer Sale To Help Support Linux Hardware Testing
For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site, a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux news coverage and relentless Linux hardware testing… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Lands ext-background-effect-v1 Support For Background Blur Effect
Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window’s background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Adding More Graphics PCI IDs For Intel Nova Lake S
In addition to this week’s drm-intel-next pull request beginning to lay out the Intel kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3, the first drm-xe-next pull request was sent out on Friday. Intel Nova Lake enablement remains the hot area for the Intel GPU driver code… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc2 Raising The Default RISC-V 64-bit CPU Limit To 256 Cores
A post merge-window change that landed in Linux Git overnight ahead of tomorrow’s Linux 7.2-rc2 release is bumping the default limit on the number of supported CPU cores for RISC-V 64-bit. Now by default Linux will support up to 256 cores with RISC-V 64-bit kernel builds… ⌘ Read more

KWin Compositor In KDE Plasma 6.8 Drops Support For Desktop OpenGL
Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter GPU Reset Recovery Becoming A Reality
While typically quite rare encountering a GPU reset under Linux in most conditions, currently if encountering one under GNOME your session gets wiped out. But thanks to a Google Summer of Code “GSoC” project this year, GNOME’s Mutter compositor is finally seeing real GPU reset recovery handling… ⌘ Read more

GNOME 51 Alpha Released With Numerous Enhancements
In working toward the stable GNOME 51 desktop release due out in September, today marks the alpha release of GNOME 51… ⌘ Read more

UPower 1.91.3 Fixes Behavior To Avoid Degrading Your Laptop Battery Faster
The UPower abstraction layer used for power management on Linux systems, especially laptops and desktops, is out with an important fix today to avoid inadvertently falling back to the laptop battery “fast” charging mode on some laptops that in turn could degrade your laptop battery faster… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan Adds Extension For OCP’s Microscaling MX Formats To Help Machine Learning
Vulkan 1.4.356 is out today and it’s interesting for the lone new extension debuting: VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types. The VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types is for enabling the Open Compute Project’s Microscaling MX data types to help with machine learning workloads with Vulkan… ⌘ Read more

Coreboot + AMD openSIL On MSI Ryzen Motherboard Now Works With Windows 11
With 3mdeb’s Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard, 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented… ⌘ Read more