Linux 7.3-rc1 With AMD Zen 6 Additions, Better Btrfs Performance & 2026 Steam Controller
Like clockwork, the Linux 7.3 merge window has concluded after two weeks and the Linux 7.3-rc1 kernel now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

AMD Zen 6 Preparations, Ryzen AI Halo LED Driver & Many Laptop Changes For Linux 7.3
The x86 platform driver changes are now in place for the Linux 7.3 kernel with additions for upcoming AMD Zen 6 hardware, the RGB LED driver controls for the Ryzen AI Halo PC, and a lot of laptop support additions and improvements for a variety of devices from different hardware vendors. Plus some handheld gaming device updates too… ⌘ Read more

‘Grand Theft Auto 6’ Preview Signals Blockbuster Demand, Analysts Say
Rockstar Games has released a 26-minute “extended look” at Grand Theft Auto VI, due for release November 19th.
After one day the video had nearly 10 million views on YouTube, and when Netflix streamed the footage, “some viewers had to refresh the page after receiving error messages, indicating high usage levels,” reports CNBC:

“Some memb … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Improving Performance & Efficiency For Some Full Screen Content
In addition to the Union QtWidgets initial release happening this week, a number of other improvements also landed in the past few days in making Plasma 6.8 all the more exciting… ⌘ Read more

GE-Proton 11-6 released with updates for Wayland, PS5 Controllers and more upgrades
The community build of Valve’s compatibility layer GE-Proton 11-6 is out now, bringing major new features and changes to running Windows games SteamOS / Linux.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/ge-proton-11-6-released-with-updates-for-waylan … ⌘ Read more

Union QtWidgets Sees Initial Release For Advancing KDE Plasma’s Union
Premiering in KDE Plasma 6.7 was Union as the new CSS-based style/theming engine for Plasma. Union ultimately aims to address KDE’s fragmented ways of styling apps. As a step closer to that goal, there is now the initial release of Union for QtWidgets support… ⌘ Read more

Bill Gates Proposes Major Limits On AI Development
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled “The turbulent AI era is he … ⌘ Read more

Intel Granite Rapids WS Core Scaling Performance With The Xeon 678X
Last week I provided a look at the Intel Xeon 600 series Hyper Threading performance with the Xeon 678X “Granite Rapids WS” processor for HT/SMT on and off. That was interesting while another reader request was to look at the CPU core scaling performance for this high-end workstation processor. Here are those benchmarks for showing the performance, power, and frequency/thermal impact of the Xeon 678X when limited to 6 cores, 12 cores, 24 cores, … ⌘ Read more

Haiku R1 Beta 6 Released After Two Years, BeOS-Inspired Project Turns 25 Next Week
Haiku R1 Beta 5 came out in September 2026 while out today is the long-awaited sixth beta for this open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. This beta release also comes one week ahead of the project’s 25th anniversary… ⌘ Read more

LLVM/Clang 23.1 Released With AMD Zen 6 & NVIDIA Rigel Support, Partial C++26 Support
LLVM 23.1 was released today on-schedule as the first stable release of the LLVM 23 series as the H2’2026 update to this open-source compiler stack… ⌘ Read more

Apple Announces New Mac Mini With M6 and M5 Pro Chips
Apple has unveiled a new Mac mini with either its new M6 chip or the M5 Pro chip released earlier this year. It adds faster CPU, GPU, storage, and AI performance along with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard. There’s also a new higher starting price of $899, which is up from the previous $799 base price and far above the $599 starting price of th … ⌘ Read more

KDE Remote Desktop Experience Improving For Closing The X11 vs. Wayland Gap
KDE developer David Edmundson is out today with a blog post around improvements that have been ongoing for the Plasma 6.8 release in improving the KDE remote desktop experience. As part of ensuring a good Wayland experience and hitting all the needs fulfilled by X11, Plasma 6.8 is seeing improvements for its remote desktop functionality… ⌘ Read more

Linux ath11k Driver Improvements For Qualcomm WiFi 6 Hardware Yields 7x Lower Latency
A patch series being worked on for the ath11k mainline wireless networking driver for Qualcomm WiFi 6 / 802.11ax chipsets is yielding 7x lower latency or 2.2x throughput at identical latency… ⌘ Read more

FDA Approves First Alzheimer’s Blood Test For Americans As Young As 40
The FDA has cleared the first Alzheimer’s blood test for symptomatic patients as young as 40. The test measures amyloid and tau biomarkers from a single blood draw and identified positive biomarkers with 97.6% accuracy in a validation study. New Atlas reports: PrecivityAD2 is a single blood test that quickly assesses the proteins am … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Improving RAID 5/6 Benchmark-Based Algorithm Selection
Following the main set of memory management “MM” changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his “non-MM” pull request of the other patches he’s been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Lands Some Enticing Performance Optimizations This Week
This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight interesting developments in the trek towards Plasma 6.8… ⌘ Read more

RPM 6.1 Released With Clang Build Fixes, New Release Model
RPM 6.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this package management system. With RPM 6.1 comes a number of features and improvements as well as a new release model… ⌘ Read more

PHP 7.4 To PHP 8.6 Benchmarks, PHP 8.6 JIT Performance
A Phoronix Premium supporter recently relayed a request to see some fresh PHP performance benchmarks. So here are some fresh numbers of PHP 7.4 through the latest PHP 8.5 code plus the current Git state of PHP 8.6 ahead of the official PHP 8.6.0 release later in the year. With PHP 8.6 is also a fresh look at the JIT performance enabled too… ⌘ Read more

New AMD Low-Power Core & Unified Intel/AMD CPU Core Type Handling In Linux 7.3
Covered first on Phoronix back in June was an AMD Linux patch for introducing a new “low power” CPU core type to complement their typical “performance” cores and their “efficiency” cores like with Zen 4C/5C. That low power core is presumed for some Zen 6 clients and that integration is now merged for Linux 7.3 as well as unifying the Intel/AMD CPU core type handling… ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 Released With Per-App Volume Control, Remote Desktop Preparations
COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Bluesky’s Active User Base Shrinks 52% Over 18 Months, But Its Protocol is Spreading
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky’s mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year … ⌘ Read more

How Larry Ellison Dropped From World’s 2nd-Richest To No. 8 In Just 2 Months
Less than a year ago he was the #1 richest man in the world. 10 weeks ago he was #2. But yesterday Larry Ellison dropped to #8, Forbes reports, falling behind Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Ellison’s net worth is now estimated at just $192.6 billion — after a $104 billion decline:

Shares of Oracle plunged roughly 54% betwe … ⌘ Read more

Why Are Big Tech CEOs Writing Long Manifestos About AI?
This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled “The Future is for Everyone”.

But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI:

[Zuckerberg’s] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the “most important technologies in history.” Marc A … ⌘ Read more

D7VK version 2.1 brings improvements to retro game loading time
D7VK continues to mature its Direct3D 7, 6, 5 and 3 to Vulkan translation, to bring improvements for retro Windows games with Wine / Proton on Linux.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 To Allow Fine-Tuning Mouse/Touchpad Speeds
KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasna is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 2.1 Brings Faster Load Times, More Performance Tweaks
D7VK as the open-source implementation of the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5/ 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for Linux/Wine usage is out with another feature update. D7VK continues to mature quite well for further enhancing these older Direct3D API versions that cover the span prior to DXVK’s focus of Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 11 or VKD3D-Proton’s Direct3D 12… ⌘ Read more

Lemonade 11.6 Integrates Muse-Glimmer 30B, Experimental TheNoise ROCm Image Generation
For those dabbling with generative AI on the weekends, the AMD-led Lemonade SDK 11.6 is out today with its newest feature release of this open-source software for running local AI apps with optimized LLMs across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1, Linux 7.2 Performance On The Intel Xeon 600 Series
With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today’s testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and other hardware, and some nice I/O performance gains on AMD EPY … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Gemini 3.7 Flash Targets Coding and Agents With a 50% Price Cut
Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after 3.6 Flash, focusing on better coding, agentic workflows, and enterprise automation while temporarily cutting API prices in half through the end of 2026. VentureBeat reports: For enterprise developers, the more consequential story may be the combination of those intellig … ⌘ Read more

KDE, Techpaladin & Kubuntu Focus Announce The Bullet-Proof KDE Software Initiative
KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the “bullet-proof KDE Software initiative” for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software… ⌘ Read more

The Best Linux 7.2 Features: Cache Aware Scheduling, AMD Zen 6, AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL
With the Linux 7.2 kernel expected to be released on Sunday, 16 August, here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with this next kernel version to be used by Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases… ⌘ Read more

Manjaro Linux 26.1 Released With GNOME 50 & KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktops
Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May is now available as the newest feature release to this desktop Linux distribution built atop an Arch Linux base… ⌘ Read more

The Pixel Tag Is Google’s Answer To the AirTag
Google has unveiled the $29 Pixel Tag, its long-awaited AirTag rival that combines UWB with Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding for two forms of precision tracking. It launches November 11. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tag is a slim oblong device available in one grayish color – Fog – that weighs about 12g, or 0.4oz. Like the AirTag, it has no built-in hooks or clips for attaching to o … ⌘ Read more

Intel AMX Performance With The Xeon 678X Workstation CPU
One of the most compelling features for Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids alongside MRDIMMs is Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for helping accelerate AI workloads and more. AMX is also found with the new Granite Rapids WS processors and in currently having my hands on an Intel Xeon 678X in the HP Z4 G6i workstation, I ran some benchmarks looking at the AMX performance and power impact for this high-end workstation. ⌘ Read more

Linux Desktop Use Surged To 22% On One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows
Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are … ⌘ Read more

OptiScaler Client 1.0.6 adds Heroic Games Launcher support, experimental gamepad support, FSR 4.1.1 for older GPUs
OptiScaler Client is a modern, high-performance desktop utility designed to simplify the installation, management, and update of the OptiScaler mod.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonl … ⌘ Read more

ProtonPlus v0.6.0 adds support for Faugus Launcher, improved controller navigation and more
ProtonPlus v0.6.0 is out improving this fantastic manager for all the different community builds of Proton, with new advanced features and general improvements.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/protonplus-v0-6-0-ad … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Improvements For UI, Built-In Remote Desktop Server
It’s been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October… ⌘ Read more

@david@daiwei.me Why not indeed 😅 I’m taking nearly a whole month off from Sept 10 to Oct 6 Haha 🤣

Microsoft Tells Engineers ‘Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For’
Microsoft is introducing AI token budgets for employees, making the cheaper GPT-5.6 its default internal model and telling engineers to focus on business results rather than maximizing AI usage. 404 Media reports: “As we accelerate our use of GitHub Copilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens,” J … ⌘ Read more

Trump Begins Selling $100,000 Monthly Subscription Service to Wall Street
Trump Media has officially launched its $100,000-per-month data feed giving trading firms machine-readable access to Truth Social posts milliseconds before the public. According to Fortune, five Wall Street firms have already signed up for the service, which “would generate about $500,000 in monthly revenue, or $6 million annually … ⌘ Read more

zlib-rs 0.6.7 Released With LoongArch LSX Optimizations, Use-After-Free Fix
zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this “safer zlib” implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc6 Fixes Some AMD Zen 5 CPUs Being Mistakenly Identified As Zen 6
Today’s batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6… ⌘ Read more

As New York Finalizes New Social Media Rules, US Senate Considers Nationwide ‘SCREEN’ Act
New York has finalized new rules that will govern social media apps in the state starting on January 25, 2027. The law prohibits social media platforms from sending notifications to minors between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. And minors “will only be shown content from other accounts … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 To Enjoy Huge Performance Gains For Multi-GPU/eGPU Performance
It’s been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin’s multi-GPU / external GPU handling… ⌘ Read more

AMD Begins Posting Display Core Next 6 “DCN6” Linux Patches For RDNA5 GPUs
AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core “DC” patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 “DCN6” as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

AMD Zen 6 Client HSMP Patches Points To “Ryzen Master” Functionality On Linux
In an interesting twist, patches this week posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are enabling AMD Zen 6 client desktop and laptop SoCs for the HSMP driver. Up to now the AMD HSMP Linux driver was just used for modern EPYC server processors while now we are seeing this HSMP driver supporting the upcoming Medusa and Olympic Ridge client platforms… Including mentions of overclocking and even noting “Ryzen Master” as the Windows-only … ⌘ Read more

NextEra, Brookfield to Build $100 Billion Kentucky Data Campus
NextEra and Brookfield plan to invest more than $100 billion to transform a former uranium-enrichment site in Kentucky into a data center campus with a generating plant. “The privately funded effort will include construction of 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power at or near the site in Paducah in western Kentucky, and as much as 2.6 gigawatts of … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also got up at 5 (I always do 😅) and went on a quick stroll around 6:30, but boy, that was chilly. So I said to myself: Screw that, I’ll try again later.

And now we’re at 32 °C. 🤣

Dunno if anyone will find this interesting… But some ~6 months or so ago I experimented briefly with creating a whole bootloader + kernel + userland – Basically an entire OS in the Mu programming language (which as you know I also designed and created) – 6 months later I’ve worked on it some more after spending the last week working on improvements to Mu itself, which is now able to compile itself with its own Mu implemented compiler and now have an os/arch backend called muos/amd64 that boots into a running shell, with a tiny little vfs, UNIX-like semantics, syscalls, read/write, etc. It works pretty nicely, and aside from a small Assembly “nucleus”, most of the Kernel and Userspace is written in Mu.

https://git.mills.io/prologic/muos