In addition to GNOME's Mutter compositor removing its X11 back-end support to focus exclusively on Wayland while keeping around XWayland client support, another notable GNOME change this week was the GTK toolkit adding a "reduced motion" accessibility option...

It's been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days...

Mesa 25.3-rc4 is available for testing as the latest weekly candidate as we work toward the Mesa 25.3 stable release this month...

Hyprland 0.52 is available today as the latest feature update for this alternative Wayland compositor...

It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical's LXD project as Incus. Now joining the Incus family is IncusOS as an immutable Linux OS built atop a Debian base with OpenZFS file-system support and designed around running containers with Incus...

Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development code.

DXVK is an important piece of Steam Play (Proton) that over time expanded to supporting Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 and even D3D8 too. Meanwhile VKD3D-Proton delivers Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. Now there is a fork of the DXVK project working to bring Direct3D 7 support atop Vulkan...

New code likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel would introduce ML-DSA/Dilithium post-quantum cryptography to be initially used for dealing with kernel module signing...

A new driver planned to be sent to the mainline Linux kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window is yet another new contribution from Microsoft...

Vulkan 1.4.332 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API specification. Besides a number of documentation clarifications/corrections, there is one new extension this week in the name of AI / machine learning...

Merged overnight to Mesa 26.0-devel and likely to be back-ported for the upcoming Mesa 25.3 release are a few fixes around high dynamic range (HDR) support within the common Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) / display code...

Last week Canonical announced Ubuntu "architecture variants" with initially supporting "amd64v3" optimized packages built using the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. For this initial debut in the Ubuntu 25.10 archive an initial subset of packages are built using that higher feature level that can assume AVX/AVX2 and other more recent CPU ISA additions. More details on that and some initial desktop benchmarks can be found within the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 Benchmarks article. Complementing that are some Ubuntu Server 25.10 benchmarks carried out on an AMD EPYC "Turin" server of the base amd64 packages versus amd64v3...

Just days after the Archinstall 3.0.12 release for this text-based Arch Linux installer, Archinstall 3.0.13 is now available to deliver a new feature. That new feature is a text-based interface for being able to connect to a WiFi network within Archinstall...

With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop.

Introduced back in August of 2024 with Vulkan 1.3.294 was VK_KHR_pipeline_binary as a pipeline binary extension to retrieve binary data associated with individual pipelines. The focus of this is to bypass the Vulkan pipeline caching mechanism and so applications can manage caches themselves. Finally today for Mesa 26.0-devel the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has enabled this extension...

CodeWeavers announced this morning a new CrossOver Preview that includes Linux ARM64 support for the first time. This commercial software built atop Wine is now comfortable with the state of running Windows x86/x64 apps on Linux ARM64 and even the ability ro enjoy many Windows games on ARM64 Linux devices like the System76 Thelio Astra...

Cloudflare announced today they have open-sourced the code to Tokio-Quiche as their async QUIC library that combines their previously-open-sourced Quiche QUIC implementation with Rust's Tokio async runtime...

Last week Mesa 26.0-devel enabled the ACO back-end by default within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all supported Radeon graphics cards by this open-source Linux driver. This move was done in the name of better performance, faster shader compilation times, and ACO being all-around better than the AMDGPU LLVM back-end these days for both OpenGL and Vulkan use. It was also noted that RadeonSI has "slightly better" viewperf performance with NIR+ACO than using the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Curious about that SPECViewPerf impact, here are some benchmarks with the recently released AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card...

Adding to the array of software projects and specifications under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard "FHS" has been adopted by these desktop-focused open-source developers...

Merged yesterday to the mainline Linux 6.18 development kernel were the latest round of x86 platform driver fixes. Mostly some small fixes but standing out is electronic privacy screen hotkey support for some Dell laptops...