When Steam on Linux debuted a decade ago it maintained around a 2% marketshare before receding and then beginning its long climb back up following the debut of Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux and then with the much anticipated Steam Deck handheld game console and the modern Arch-based SteamOS. Valve just published their May 2024 numbers for the Steam Survey and they indicate the Linux marketshare is finally back above 2%...

It's been another busy week with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack with continued preparations around enabling support for next-generation RDNA4 graphics (as well as continued RDNA3+ / RDNA 3.5 tuning)...

As some more exciting news for upcoming Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake integrated graphics and Battlemage discrete GPUs, the latest open-source driver activity for Linux has confirmed Xe2 supporting native 64-bit integer arithmetic...

May 2024 is now in the books with 285 original news articles written by your's truly last month along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. It was an interesting month with some fun new hardware launches, the Linux 6.10 merge window taking place, and other open-source software progress...

It's not too common for Intel to publish new CPU microcode updates outside of their "Patch Tuesday" regiment but that happened yesterday with a Friday night release of new CPU microcode although this time is limited to the Celeron and Pentium Silver families...

While the Gentoo Linux project recently established an AI policy to forbid contributions to the project made using any AI tools/assistance and NetBSD also came out with a similar policy against AI-generated code, the Debian project for now has no project-wide policy regarding AI...

Expressed last week was a "major issue" from the GNOME Foundation side with regard to the Sovereign Tech Fund partnership for funding a number of useful improvements to the GNOME software stack just as Germany's STF has been doing to a number of other prominent open-source projects. While there still aren't many clear public details on this "major issue", a Friday night update from the GNOME side seems to indicate all is well and they are also embarking on additional development funding initiatives...

Vulkan 1.3.286 was released today with a handful of corrections/clarifications as well as one new extension...

Wine 9.10 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

The open-source Godot game engine has worked its way up to the Godot 4.3 Beta 1 milestone with some exciting achievements...

Jean-Baptiste Kempf released Dav1d 1.4.2 as the newest version of this speedy CPU-based AV1 video decoder. With this new dav1d 1.4.2 update are yet more performance optimizations for modern systems...

Intel engineer Noah Goldstein has landed another nice performance optimization in the GNU C Library "glibc" for benefiting newer Intel processors...

Right now when dealing with quirky/buggy touchscreens a C file needs to be manually manipulated and the Linux kernel recompiled. With a new "i2c_touchscreen_props" kernel command line option on its way to the mainline kernel, the process of overriding touchscreen properties is dramatically easier for those dealing with Linux on touchscreen-enabled devices...

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet sent in a batch of file-system fixes on Thursday for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel. In that pull request he teased features that are set to arrive with the Linux 6.11 kernel later in the summer...

Last month we began seeing AMDGPU driver firmware files published for the rumored "RDNA3+" hardware as an RDNA3 refresh (also as "RDNA 3.5") for upcoming APUs. More firmware files have now landed public in linux-firmware.git for these forthcoming RDNA3 refresh products...

If the recent release of Flowblade 2.16 video editor wasn't of interest to you due to being GTK-based software, the Qt/KDE-aligned Kdenlive video editor is out this week with its Kdenlive 24.05 feature release...

Simon Ser today released Wayland 1.23 for this core Wayland code that brings some minor enhancements, bug fixes, and Wayland protocol clarifications...

Given Microsoft's recent BUILD conference, Microsoft has announced a number of sizable updates to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)...

Last week with the AMD EPYC 4004 review and benchmarks I tested nearly the entire product stack for these new AM5-based server processors with the EPYC 4244P (6 cores), EPYC 4344P (8 cores), EPYC 4364P (8 cores), EPYC 4464P (12 cores), EPYC 4484X (12 cores + 3D V-Cache), EPYC 4564P (16 cores), and EPYC 4584PX (16 cores + 3D V-Cache). The only EPYC 4004 class processor I wasn't able to finish testing in time was the entry-level EPYC 4124P as a 4-core processor with $149 retail price. I've now had the time to finish benchmarking that budget-focused Zen 4 server processor as well as seeing how it compares to the 4-core Skylake Xeons that were prolific for years.