Linux 7.0 Brings Apple Type-C PHY, Snapdragon X2 & Rockchip HDMI 2.1 FRL Additions
Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some notable PHY additions particularly for Apple Silicon USB Type-C support as well as additions for Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs… ⌘ Read more

Mesa KosmicKrisp Driver Is Coming To iOS, More Performance & Vulkan 1.4 Expected
Last year LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan implementation atop Apple’s Metal API. Initially targeting macOS, KosmicKrisp since was merged to Mesa and has evolved quite nicely as a modern implementation of Vulkan-on-Metal for Apple Silicon. It continues moving ahead with an eye for iOS, more performance optimizations, and completing Vulkan 1.4 support… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.344 Released With New Extension From Valve
Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers… ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro For ‘Complex Problem-Solving’
Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro “represents a st … ⌘ Read more

Intel Vulkan Driver Lands One-Line Change That Can Bring Minor Performance Benefits
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or up to 3% noted in some select games… ⌘ Read more

PipeWire 1.6 Released With Many New Features
PipeWire 1.6 is out today as the newest feature release for this software widely used by the Linux desktop for managing of audio and video streams while nicely integrating with sandboxed Flatpak apps and more… ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Testifies During Landmark Trial On Social Media Addiction
Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in a landmark Los Angeles trial examining whether Meta and other social media firms can be held liable for designing platforms that allegedly addict and harm children. NBC News reports: It’s the first of a consolidated group of cases – from more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and … ⌘ Read more

Experimental Out-Of-Tree Code Aims To Provide HDMI 2.1 FRL For AMD Linux Driver
One of the limitations of the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has been the lack of its support for HDMI 2.1 and later. AMD has wanted to support HDMI 2.1+ functionality under Linux but it’s been legally blocked by the HDMI Forum. But anxious independent users have been working on open-source patches for wiring up HDMI 2.1 into the AMDGPU driver outside of the realm of AMD and the HDMI Forum’s blessings… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.2 & Other LTS Kernels Released To Fix Systems Not Booting
Linux 6.19.1 was released earlier today while it’s since been replaced by Linux 6.19.2 to address fallout from that first point release with some systems not booting. This also resulted in new LTS kernel releases too due to the problematic code being picked up there too… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.1 Released To Ship Some Early Fixes & Device Quirks
For those preferring to wait for the first point release of a new Linux kernel version before upgrading, Linux 6.19.1 is out today to address some early bugs that made it into the Linux 6.19 kernel stable release one week ago… ⌘ Read more

Vim 9.2 Released
“More than two years after the last major 9.1 release, the Vim project has announced Vim 9.2,” reports the blog Linuxiac:

A big part of this update focuses on improving Vim9 Script as Vim 9.2 adds support for enums, generic functions, and tuple types.

On top of that, you can now use built-in functions as methods, and class handling includes features like protected constructors with _new(). The :defcompile command has also been impro … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance’s Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt
1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance’s new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.
But while ByteDance gushes their tool “delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards,” the cinema industry isn’t h … ⌘ Read more

Godot 4.7 Making Progress On Vulkan Ray-Tracing
One of the latest exciting developments for the open-source Godot game engine is beginning to lay out support for Vulkan ray-tracing… ⌘ Read more

Libinput 1.31 Released With Configurable Timeouts, Fast 3-Finger Swipes
Red Hat’s leading input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release overnight of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X.Org and Wayland desktop sessions… ⌘ Read more

AMD Video Decode Now Unified Between RadeonSI & RADV Vulkan Video
Merged today to Mesa 26.1-devel is unifying of the AMD video decode implementation between the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool
Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company’s in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic’s Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption o … ⌘ Read more

The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

EVs Could Be Cheaper To Own Than Gas Cars in Africa by 2040
Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems – solar panels, batteries and an inverter – could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040.

The analys … ⌘ Read more

UK Orders Deletion of Country’s Largest Court Reporting Archive
The UK’s Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country’s largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021.

Courtsdesk’s research found that journa … ⌘ Read more

Go 1.26 Introduces Two Language Changes, New Performance Improvements
For programmers fond of the Go programming language, Go 1.26 is out today with two language changes, performance improvements, and other alterations to this Google-backed programming language… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.1 Lands Raycast Nodes, Blender Adjusting Release Cycle Moving Forward
Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software… ⌘ Read more

Do Super Bowl Ads For AI Signal a Bubble About to Burst?
It’s the first “AI” Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they’re “mostly negative” about AI-generated ads.

Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be “inescapable” — even … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Explored Island Cave, Found 1 Million-Year-Old Remnants a Lost World
“A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand’s North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago,” reports Popular Mechanics:

The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including sever … ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.3 Brings Support For Direct3D 5 On Vulkan
D7VK is a fork of the DXVK project that is an important part of Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 support atop Vulkan. With D7VK the original goal was a Direct3D 7 implementation on Vulkan. D7VK 1.1 brought experimental Direct3D 6 support and now with today’s release of D7VK 1.3 is support for Direct3D 5… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Glycin 2.1 Beta Enables JPEG 2000 Support By Default
GNOME’s Rust-based and sandboxed Glycin image loading library focused on safety now supports JPEG 2000 images by default… ⌘ Read more

Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites
Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft’s automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s Tax Bill Plunges 87% After Tax Cuts
An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans’ tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon’s tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion.

That’s largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beau … ⌘ Read more

Memory Prices Have Nearly Doubled Since Last Quarter
Memory prices across DRAM, NAND and HBM have surged 80 to 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to Counterpoint Research’s latest Memory Price Tracker. The price of a 64GB RDIMM has jumped from a Q4 2025 contract price of $450 to over $900, and Counterpoint expects it to cross $1,000 in Q2.

NAND, relatively stable last quarter, is tracking a parallel increase. De … ⌘ Read more

Big Tech’s $1.1 Trillion Cloud Computing Backlog
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) – signed contracts for cloud computing services that can’t yet be filled and haven’t yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.

[![](https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.pn … ⌘ Read more

Intel ISPC 1.30 Released With AMX Support Added To The Standard Library
Intel ISPC 1.30 is now available as the latest feature update to their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a variant of the C programming language to easily target their array of CPUs and GPUs… ⌘ Read more

System76’s COSMIC Desktop Planning Vulkan Renderer, Improved Gaming Experience
Following December’s release of COSMIC Epoch 1 along with the Pop!_OS 24.04 release by System76, today they shared more of their feature plans for the next two major COSMIC desktop updates… ⌘ Read more

libinput 1.31 Bringing Support For Fast Three-Finger Swipes
Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by both modern X.Org Server and Wayland desktop environments… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies
OpenAI’s rivals are cutting into ChatGPT’s lead. From a report: The top chatbot’s market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, … ⌘ Read more

Walmart Joins $1 Trillion Club
Walmart’s market cap surpassed $1 trillion on Tuesday, putting the largest U.S. retail chain in an exclusive club dominated by tech groups. Bloomberg adds: The Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain – a longtime favorite of bargain-hunting consumers – has flexed its massive scale and supplier network to keep prices low and grab market share across the income spectrum. While Walmart has maintained its appeal to households … ⌘ Read more

Adobe Is Killing A Popular Animation And Game Development Program
Adobe has emailed users of Adobe Animate to let them know the popular animation and game development program will be discontinued on March 1, an abrupt decision that has angered animators and game developers who say the tool remains an industry standard in television and game production.

Animate, the successor to the once-popular Flash, is wid … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Acquires xAI in $1.25 Trillion All-Stock Deal
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired his AI startup xAI in an all-stock deal that values the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, ahead of what would be the largest initial public offering in history. SpaceX pegged its own valuation at $1 trillion – a markup from the $800 billion it commanded in a December secondary stock sale – and priced xAI at $250 billion based on a recent $20 … ⌘ Read more

Leica Camera’s Owners Weigh $1.2 Billion Sale of Controlling Stake
The owners of Leica Camera AG – Austrian billionaire Andreas Kaufmann and private equity giant Blackstone – are considering a sale of a controlling stake in the German camera maker in a deal that could value the company at about $1.2 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

HSG, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Resources 1.10 Adds Monitoring Support For AMD Ryzen AI NPUs
GNOME Resources 1.10 was christened today as the newest version of this modern system monitoring app for the GNOME desktop that is now used by default on the likes of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. With GNOME Resources 1.10 they have added AMD Ryzen AI NPU monitoring support and other new capabilities… ⌘ Read more

Shotcut Video Editor Now Using Hardware Decoding By Default Except For NVIDIA On Linux
Shotcut 26.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform video editing solution. Shotcut 26.1 is finally defaulting to GPU hardware accelerated video decoding by default for all platforms sans NVIDIA GPUs on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Budgie 10.10.1 Released With Better Stability & Improved Labwc Integration
Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January… ⌘ Read more

Can We Slow Global Warming By Phasing Out Super-Pollutant HFCs?
“There’s one big bright spot in the fight against climate change that most people never think about,” reports the Washington Post.

“It could prevent nearly half a degree of global warming this century, a huge margin for a planet that has warmed almost 1.5 degrees Celsius and is struggling to keep that number below 2 degrees…”

[M]ore than 170 c … ⌘ Read more

GNU gettext Reaches Version 1.0 After 30 Years
After more than 30 years of development, GNU gettext finally “crossed the symbolic ‘v1.0’ milestone,” according to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel. “GNU gettext 1.0 brings PO file handling improvements, a new ‘po-fetch’ program to fetch translated PO files from a translation project’s site on the Internet, new ‘msgpre’ and ‘spit’ pre-translation programs, and Ocaml and Rust programming l … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.342 Published With Cooperative Matrix Conversion Extension
Following last week’s Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 With New LLM Model Support
Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM… ⌘ Read more

Windows 11 Has Reached 1 Billion Users Faster Than Windows 10
An anonymous reader shares a report: Windows 11 now has one billion users. Microsoft hit the milestone during the recent holiday quarter, meaning Windows 11 has managed to reach one billion users faster than Windows 10 did nearly six years ago.

“Windows reached a big milestone, 1 billion Windows 11 users,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the compa … ⌘ Read more

Libgcrypt 1.12 Released With VAES/AVX-512 Accelerated AES: 2x Performance On AMD Zen 5
Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software… ⌘ Read more

Valve Developer Improves Aging AMD APUs On Linux With VRR, DP/HDMI Audio, HDR & Atomic
Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics team last year addressed remaining issues in the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver so old AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs could transition to using AMDGPU by default rather than the former “Radeon” kernel driver that is largely in maintenance mode for pre-GCN/RDNA GPUs. One caveat though was the GCN 1.1 APU support still having some limitations leading to Kaveri and friends no … ⌘ Read more

GNU gettext Reaches Version 1.0 After 30+ Years In Development - Adds LLM Features
Sun Microsystems began developing gettext in the early 1990s and the GNU Project began GNU gettext development in 1995 for this widely-used internationalization and localization system commonly for multi-lingual integration. While GNU gettext is commonly used by countless open-source projects and adapted for many different programming languages, only an hour ago was GNU gettext 1.0 finally released… ⌘ Read more

Amazon To Pay $309 Million To US Shoppers In Settlement Over Returns
Amazon has agreed to pay $309 million and provide additional remedies in a class-action settlement over claims that customers were wrongly denied refunds after returning items. Plaintiffs say (PDF) the deal delivers over $1 billion in total value, including more than $600 million in refunds and operational changes. Reuters reports: Amazon d … ⌘ Read more

New Intel Linux Driver Workaround Halves Initial Game Load Time For MHW
In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initi … ⌘ Read more