Servo Browser Engine Continues Broadening Web Compatibility, New Features
The Servo open-source browser engine project is finally out with their status report highlighting the improvements made back in September. There is expanded web compatibility, new HTML and JavaScript features, WebGL2 improvements, and continued work on expanding the embed capabilities of this engine… ⌘ Read more

Mesa Merges A Common Vulkan Layer For Working Around Cross-Driver Game Bugs
Merged to Mesa 27.0-devel is a new common Vulkan layer within Mesa’s Vulkan Runtime for being able to carry common game/engine/app workarounds that affect multiple drivers… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Finds 948 Local Privilege Escalation Bugs In The Linux Kernel
OpenAI published a blog post outlining their work on autonomous vulnerability discovery. To showcase their AI potential, they found 948 valid local privilege escalation vulnerabilities within the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Vietnam Jails Pirate Football Streamers For Up To a Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A Vietnamese court has sentenced 14 people who worked on the pirate football streaming site Bun Cha TV, handing out the first prison terms we’ve seen since the country’s piracy crackdown began earlier this year. […] Four defendants, including the heads of the content, programming and operations teams, wer … ⌘ 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

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

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Not much honestly 😅 During the storms Picket sat at ~0.2 of a CPU core (peaks ~0.4), up from ~0.02 at idle, so ~10× but still tiny. Memory didn’t budge: ~650 MiB working set before, during and after. Picket’s doing its job; it’s the git forge behind it that would’ve fallen over.

The specialists were at work here once again.

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

Cops Bust Botnet of 1.3 Million Android TV Boxes
A coalition of security firms working with Japan’s National Police Agency has disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices across 200+ countries. “We assess with high confidence that the backdoor and botnet were intentionally developed, deployed, and operated for financial gain by Videostrong Technology,” the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a blog po … ⌘ Read more

@zyak@twtxt.z85b.xyz Heck yeah, that looks really nice, mate! My last shot at them was way back in school. But it never really worked out even remotely like I imagined in my head. My colors always mixed, it was impossible to keep them separated. Maybe too much water and the wrong paper. I should give it a go again, too.

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

In more frustrating news, I did something to my primary laptop, and now it crawls along like a 2005 Celeron trying to run Windows Vista.

My laptop is nothing too special (a Lenovo powered by an i7-1255U (4+8) @ 4.70 GHz with integrated “Iris Xe” graphics), but I’ve been running Manjaro Linux (with KDE Plasma) on it for the past couple of years, and apart from the odd pamac / pacman / “Add Remove Software” inconsistency (or Plasma widget issue), it’s been running pretty well.

Then, a few days ago, it started bugging about updates, and yesterday it added complaints about an unsupported kernel, so I finally pulled the trigger on it, and boy do I regret it.

I initially kept having issues downloading all of the updates (it was trying to download some kind of non-existent Quake-related library, which I had to remove), and I also had issues getting rid of the unsupported 7.1 kernel (due to some “meta” packages that had been installed), but in the end, I resolved both issues, got the kernel removed and the updates installed, and everything seemed fine after the post-update reboot… for about 10 minutes.

And that’s when the machine just decided to start moving at 1/3 speed: typing, moving the cursor, changing windows - everything started acting like it was 2008.

When I first tried to diagnose it, top showed kwin_wayland eating 50% of the CPU, and plasmashell another 10%, but it wasn’t consistent (they both came and went). I disabled all of the desktop effects, which helped some, as did blanking my plasma config (setting my desktop back to default), but things are still noticeably laggier than they were a few days ago.

Someone online suggested freeing up 25% space total on my root drive (which typically runs 90-95% full), so I’ve been cleaning up (and offloading) as much as I can. If that doesn’t work and I don’t find a solution by the end of the week, I’ll probably have to backup my data, wipe the machine clean, and start fresh. 🙃

Meta Discussed ‘Whisper Strategy’ to Discredit Social Media Critic Jonathan Haidt, Files Show
The Guardian reports:
Meta staff discussed deploying a “whisper strategy” to undermine the influential US academic whose work has inspired a global social media crackdown, according to court documents. Employees at the parent group of Facebook and Instagram sought to discredit Jonathan Haidt, … ⌘ Read more

Open source evolution sim ‘Thrive’ v1.7 works towards completing the multicellular stage
The multicellular stage is getting more complete for the open source evolution sim Thrive, with version 1.7 out now.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/open-source-evolution-sim-thrive-v1-7-works-towards-completing-the-m … ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@twtxt.net Yeah, I think you can get pretty far with a few careful lines of config. But what I have here is a bit more sophisticated. Picket fingerprints connecting clients and is table to work out for example what software and stack your client is, if it really is Chrome or you’re pretneding to be Chrome.

CachyOS Linux working on a dedicated kernel for supporting Easy Anti-Cheat v2
With the new Epic Games Launcher supported on Linux, along with a remade Easy Anti-Cheat coming, the CachyOS team are working on kernel support for EAC v2.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/cachyos-linux-working-on-a-dedicated-kernel-for-su … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Core Desktop has been restarted with a dedicated team with plans to improve Linux gaming
Ubuntu Core Desktop is Canonical’s immutable version of Ubuntu Linux, and they’re back to working on it for desktop users.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/ubuntu-core-desktop-has-been-restarted-with-a- … ⌘ Read more

AMD’s ROCm HRX Loom v0.1 Released For Targeting AMD CPUs, GPUs & NPUs
At this year’s AMD Advancing AI event Hyperloom was announced among the ROCm improvements to expect. Hyperloom aims for agentic workload optimizations and more with quote powerful abilities if everything works out right. As part of the latest round of ROCm advancements, the Loom SDK v0.1 release was released today… ⌘ Read more

Since building a new Edge service and capability I’ve decided to call “Picket”, I’m now dropping about ~40% of incoming traffic to the floor in various ways. Whole botnets, search engines, crawlers and all sorts of unwanted traffic are just going splat 💥 – Turns out measuring cohorts by fingerprinting and behaviour analysis from connection stats and logs alone is “enough”™ to block most unwanted traffic. Things like Anubis, using a PoW, which I tried, don’t really work in my expeirence.

I had dinner with some mates in the city. After 20 o’clock there are basically no trains running anymore due to construction work today and tomorrow. You can take the rail replacement service, but that more than doubles the travel time (over two hours instead of three quarters). Also, replacement buses always call for trouble. You just wanna avoid it at all costs.

I was kinda lucky and took a still running (probably last one) medium-distance train. But I had to exit one station early because it didn’t stop at my destination. Instead of waiting three quarters of an hour in 6°C for a quarter hour bus ride, I decided to just quickly walk the 5 kilometers at a smart pace. It took me 50 minutes. I opted for the direct and way uglier route, the nicer one through the forest would have added another 20 minutes to half an hour. Also, I didn’t wear my hiking boots.

Despite the horrible smell of the gelatine factory and walking right next to a four-lane road, it could have been worse. I saw an oversize load (a new rock crusher was sent from the factory to its new home), that was quite cool. It was also surprising how many cars had a broken tail light or illegally overtook on the right. Crazy! Luckily, there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic anymore.

The moon and the clouds looked really nice. Same with the foggy patches here and there. I got some much-needed exercise. The cold air felt good. I call that a success.

Linux Kernel Developers Considering Removal Of KGDB Debugging Functionality
Merged to the kernel all the way back in Linux 2.6.26 in 2008 was KGDB for improving the kernel debugging experience. KGDB works in conjunction with the GNU Debugger (GDB) to debug the kernel in a similar fashion to user-space debugging. KGDB requires the use of a second computer connected via serial or network cable. KGDB isn’t widely used in recent years and a patch was floated today to remove it from the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Finds ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Lacks Productivity Gains
Ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure shares a report from Tom’s Hardware, adding: “Huh. Looks like consuming one’s own slop does not turn the wheels of industry.” From the report: Amazon wants its engineers to quit chasing token counts, warning that heavy AI usage does not automatically mean better work. In updated engineering guidelines published on October 27, the company l … ⌘ Read more

EMACS Turns 50
“EMACS, the mother of all editors, turns 50!” writes Slashdot reader dr_jerry, sharing a report from MIT Technology Review: Programming used to be a very different experience from the one we know today. In fact, the first programmers didn’t write code at all; the six women who worked on the ENIAC, one of the world’s first computers, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 did it by physically configuring switches, cables, and plugboards.

A … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Preps CXL For Very Neat Dynamic Capacity Devices “DCD”
The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem changes were merged today for the Linux 7.4 kernel. The fun work this cycle is preparing to support Dynamic Capacity Devices… ⌘ Read more

Firefox Tries to Bring Back the Internet’s ‘Good Old Days’
Mozilla launched a new ad campaign for Firefox that leverages early internet nostalgia in a bid to win back users who switched browsers. “Today’s internet tracks you, interrupts you, and asks for permissions it already took. But it wasn’t always that way, and it’s not how it’s supposed to work,” writes Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo in a post on LinkedIn. “It’ … ⌘ Read more

KWin-Type Introduced To Address KDE Wayland Usability Gap For Auto-Typing Text
Open-source developer Jason Donenfeld known for his work on WireGuard announced today the release of kwin-type. KWin-type is a new Wayland-compatible program for auto-typing text from the standard input under the KWin Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

Microlandia, a deeply simulated city-builder gets a big game engine upgrade
Every single citizen counts in Microlandia, a deeply simulated cozy-looking city-builder. And now, it should work better than ever.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Begins Employing New “Core MM” Tree
Core memory management patches to the Linux kernel have typically been routed to mainline via Andrew Morton’s “MM” branch, which is where also a variety of broader memory management related patches are also queued like all the ongoing work to DAMON/DAMOS. Kernel maintainers have now agreed to a new “Core MM” tree as the home for all of the core memory management changes moving forward… ⌘ Read more

Moxnox: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible Hobby OS Running Atop Btrfs
Open-source developer Mark Harmstone who is known for his work on developing a Btrfs file-system driver for Windows has spent the past few years working on a new hobby operating system. Moxnox is an HT-like, POSIX-compatible operating system… ⌘ Read more

👋 Just a friendly reminder that if I don’t actually see any “use in anger” of this little container service I call cas.run – Then I can’t actually see how it will behave, perform and whether or not something like this will even remotely work and is worth continuing ot build out 😅 Please 🙏 and thank you 🙇‍♂️

Realtek rtl8723bs Driver Graduates Out Of Staging Area In Linux 7.4
After nearly a decade in the Linux kernel’s staging area and being worked on by many different kernel developer newcomers, the Realtek rtl8723bs graduated out of the staging area and is now a full-fledged member of the Linux networking subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Fixes AMD CPU TLB Size Reporting For Zen 5 & Newer
As a follow-up to the article in September about a Linux patch for fixing under-reported AMD Zen 5 TLB sizes, that work is now merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel… ⌘ Read more

@thecanine@twtxt.net I fell you 100%.

My son asked me to fix his Win11 laptop: When he logs in, he gets a GSoD (gray screen of death). So, I fiddle with it for a few minutes, and I get it to login, but now the start menu button doesn’t work. So, I fiddle with it for another hour, and I get the start menu working, but he only has 2 GB free on his primary drive, and that’s not enough for all of the “critical” Windows updates it needs, so now I’m moving files around…

I know everyone says how “user friendly” Windows is, but I call BS on that - my Manjaro install may not always work perfectly, but at least my Start menu button does…

Since honesty is kindness, Microsoft is by far the worst company I ever had the displeasure of trying to communicate with. Getting them to fix the most basic of bugs always took years. In some cases it’s been over two and a half decades and it’s still broken.

I never thought it was even possible to make an operating system so broken, I’d have to manually restart my background services and set “network interface metrics” by hand, in advanced TCP/IP settings, while using it.

There are buttons that don’t even do anything when clicked and ones I’ve never seen do anything other than throw an error message.

The AI they rent to pretend to be an AI company, was for years outputting paragraphs, describing the beautiful and artful checkerboard pattern in the background, whenever trying to analyze transparent images. Transparent profile pictures work only on GitHub, the one product where the implementation was done prior to Microsoft acquisition.

Many engineers in their own forums, still manage to make that very AI sound smart, in comparison.

The design is an absolute shitshow, where no two things look like they belong in the same system — the only thing almost consistent, is excessive padding and rounded corners, placed wherever they fit the least.

But hey, 5000 engineers were fired, that will surely improve things!

x86 Kernel Shadow Stacks Being Worked On For Linux As Powerful Control Flow Protection
Linux user-space for several years had shadow stack support for hardware-enforced control-flow enforcement in defending against return oriented programming (ROP) attacks. Intel Tigerlake and newer CPUs or AMD Zen 3 and newer have the necessary hardware shadow stacks support. Shadow stacks have been effective for helping user-space software fend ROP attacks while now there is new work toward bringing shadow stack support for k … ⌘ Read more

Mesa RADV Change Satisfies More Steam Play Games On Aging AMD GFX8 GPUs
Valve landed a patch in Mesa 27.0 and to be back-ported to current Mesa stable series to satisfy more games running under Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton for working on AMD GFX8 GPUs like Polaris… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Begins Landing Patches To Speed Up The Kernel Build Process
There are notable patches by Arm engineer Lorenzo Stoakes that have begun landing in Linux 7.4 for speeding up the Linux kernel build process. This work can provide some significant reductions in the Linux kernel build time… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Kernel Crypto Library Enjoying Optimized AES Implementations On x86 & RISC-V
The latest Linux kernel cryptographic subsystem performance work carried out by Google engineer Eric Biggers is migrating x86/x86_64 and RISC-V optimized implementations of different AES modes into the lib/crypto kernel crypto library to enjoy faster performance there… ⌘ Read more

Government Websites Go Dark After Severe PHP Vulnerabilities Disclosed
“PHP disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in their programming language and urged web site operators to immediately apply the fix,” writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. “As a result, government web sites in Europe and elsewhere temporarily went dark on Wednesday as operators worked to protect their systems.” The Inde … ⌘ Read more

AMD Working On Ryzen Overclocking Driver For Linux
AMD recently published patches for the Linux kernel to implement AOD, an AMD Overclocking driver for Ryzen processors. Linux enthusiasts have long sought an official AMD Ryzen CPU overclocking driver for Linux akin to Ryzen Master on Windows and it’s finally coming, at least from the kernel driver perspective… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd Working Toward Proper Android Integration
Google Chromebooks already have a mandate for nice Fwupd support with the Linux Vendor Firmware (LVFS) while now there is work on improving the Android integration for Fwupd/LVFS… ⌘ Read more

Meta Makes Improvements To Kernfs Scalability With Linux 7.4
Kernfs as the functions/frameworks used for creating pseudo file-systems on Linux like sysfs and configfs have seen some nice scalability work carried out by Meta. After Meta engineers discovered some system daemons getting stuck for minutes on their massive fleet of servers, they uncovered some scalability bottlenecks within Kernfs that now look to be resolved for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

THE FINALS gets a huge update with enhanced destruction and a free for all mode
One of the few competitive online first-person shooters that works on SteamOS / Linux, THE FINALS just had a massive upgrade.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/the-finals-gets-a-huge-update-with-enhanced-destruction-and-a-free-for-all … ⌘ Read more

Intel & AMD Now Collaborating On Software Optimizations With PyTorch/oneDNN
Intel has long worked on tuning their oneDNN neural network library for their hardware and saw its adoption by PyTorch and other AI frameworks. AMD has maintained ZenDNN as their downstream fork that is oneDNN API compatible while catering to their Zen processor designs. As an interesting twist, AMD and Intel jointly announced today they will be collaborating around oneDNN for PyTorch and pushing the AMD Zen improvements into oneDNN… ⌘ Read more

Wine Ported to OpenBSD
Wine has been successfully ported to OpenBSD, with developers reporting that dozens of 64-bit Windows applications now run on the operating system. “Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well,” writes Thomas Frohwein, OpenBSD developer and ports maintainer. OSnews reports: The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won’t work. Still, this … ⌘ Read more

Intel Working To Add XMX-Accelerated XeSS To Valve’s Steam Play (Proton)
An Intel engineer opened the pull requests today for adding Intel XeSS support to Valve’s Proton for Steam Play along with associated changes to VKD3D-Proton and DXVK… ⌘ Read more

In the age of AI, PR reviews at work only serve these purposes:

• A PR makes me vaguely aware that something exists. Like, I now know that there’s a component over here that probably does something with this other component over there. Maybe.
  
• I can “gauge the risk”: Is this something that I can simply throw away once it breaks? If not, I’ll have to bite the bullet and start a more detailed discussion about what the flying fuck your 8000 new lines of code actually do. And then you’ll pull the “but I don’t have time for this discussion”-card and we merge anyway.
  
• Shift the blame from author to reviewer: “It passed review! The builds were green!”
  
• I don’t need pills anymore to raise my low blood pressure.
  

It’s so disheartening to see everyone vomit out bullshit. “You can use AI responsibly and actually make the code better”, my ass. Nobody does that. Not a single soul. No human. Ever. None. Nobody.

GNOME Mutter Lands Improvement For Reducing GPU Work While In Power Savings Mode
Stemming from a bug report one month ago with GNOME 51 over high GPU usage while the monitor is sleeping, a set of 17 patches were merged today for addressing this issue… ⌘ Read more