Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player originally based on MPlayer/mplayer2 is finally out with a new release.

LXQt 2.5 released today as the newest feature update to this lightweight, Qt6-based desktop environment.

For those making use of the LZ4 extremely fast compression algorithm, LZ4 1.11 released today and brings multi-threaded compression support to its library (liblz4).

Along with today's release of the NVIDIA 620.70.06 Linux driver, NVIDIA also released CUDA 13.5 that brings general availability (GA) support for Vera Rubin.

Back in 2023 Intel introduced One Mono as a new font for developers. Intel in September had discontinued the One Mono project but then days later revived it. Now the project is out with its first update since that mishap.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Domicile is a new Wayland compositor that leverages Chromium for allowing custom Linux desktops to be built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript.

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.

Following the release of NetBSD 11.0 in August, NetBSD 11.1 is out today with a collection of security fixes and other improvements.

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.

After challenged by two release delays, Fedora 45 is officially out as the latest six-month update to this leading Linux distribution.

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.

The openSUSE Leap 16.1 Linux distribution is out today and built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1.

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.

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.

Bavarian-based enterprise Linux distribution vendor SUSE is laying off 10% of its global workforce as a result of AI and automation.

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.

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.

AerynOS 2026.11 was released today along with a lengthy blog post highlighting the recent development work on this original Linux distribution.

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.

The FreeRDP 3.33 software released today as the newest version of this open-source Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation.

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.

Raspberry Pi announced their latest round of price hikes as a result of the RAM shortages and increased pricing continuing to affect the industry.

Valve just published their Steam Survey results for October and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use on a relative basis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I love a good performance optimization and there are several this week in the KDE space with Plasma 6.9 development heating up.

The Ceph kernel client changes have been submitted for Linux 7.4 ahead of its merge window expected to wrap up on Sunday.

In recent weeks GNOME developers have been discussing a formal Request For Comments "RFC" process for solving major technical questions and changes to GNOME. This formalized process for succeeding their ad-hoc processes up to now has reached consensus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Following this month's release of Ubuntu 26.10, Ubuntu 27.04 development formally got underway today.

The x86 platform driver changes were merged this week to the Linux 7.4 kernel ahead of the merge window closing this weekend.

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.

As anticipated, the AMD PerfOpt feature was picked up for the Linux 7.4 kernel. As shown already in multiple Phoronix benchmarks, AMD PerfOpt makes for a nice performance boost for AMD integrated graphics, especially for AI workloads.

The Linux kernel's "macsmc" driver was developed for supporting the system management controller (SMC) on Apple Silicon Macs for supporting the light sensor, fan control, and other sensors. That macsmc driver now is seeing work to extend it for better supporting older Intel-powered Macs.

Vulkan 1.4.367 is out this morning as the newest spec revision for this high performance graphics and compute API.

The I3C changes for Linux 7.4 were submitted this week by Bootlin's Alexandre Belloni and subsequently merged.