Wine 9.8 Fixes Nearly 20 Year Old Bug For Installing Microsoft Office 97
Wine 9.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux / Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

GCC’s Rust Compiler To See Improvements With GSoC 2024
Google Summer of Code 2024 (GSoC ‘24) accepted projects have been announced with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing seven student developers engaging this summer with several of them focused on enhancing GCC’s Rust front-end… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Working On Improving Its Audio Stack & Creating Graphical OS Installer
The FreeBSD project has published its Q1’2024 status report to outline various advancements over the past few months… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2405 Gets Close To Running Far Cry On ARM Linux Systems
FEX as the open-source project to run x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems is out with its newest monthly release. With FEX 2405, they are close to having the game Far Cry (2004) running on ARM Linux devices… ⌘ Read more

Mold 2.31 Now ~10% Faster When Linking Very Large, Debug Info Enabled Binaries
Rui Ueyama announced the release of Mold 2.31 today as the newest version of this high speed linker alternative to LLVM LLD and GNU Gold… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 1.9.19 Supports New Docks, Incorporates More Fixes
LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes has released Fwupd 1.9.19 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Intel Talks Up Their Latest Compiler Toolchain Enhancements For AVX10.1, AMX & More
Intel software engineer Victor Rodriguez presented at the Open-Source Summit North America last month on their open-source compiler toolchain work for enabling ISA capabilities of upcoming Intel CPUs as well as using simulation tools for helping to test compiler enhancements/optimizations moving forward… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.2.4 Released With Linux 6.8 Support
OpenZFS 2.2.4 was released on Thursday evening to provide the latest ZFS file-system support on Linux and FreeBSD platforms… ⌘ Read more

Dell Laptop Platform Profile Patches Being Worked On For Linux
A patch recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is working on implementing ACPI Platform Profile support for modern Dell laptops to allow users to have more control over their balanced / cool / quiet / performance behavior of the laptop and its resulting impact on the fan noise / cooling performance… ⌘ Read more

Proton 9.0-1 Released With Many Improvements For Steam Play Linux Gaming
Valve and CodeWeavers have announced the availability of Proton 9.0-1 as their Wine downstream that pulls in DXVK and VKD3D-Proton along with other changes and powers Steam Play for Linux desktop gaming and on the Steam Deck… ⌘ Read more

XWayland 24.1 RC2 Brings Fixes For Explicit Sync & DRM Leasing
Red Hat’s Olivier Fourdan announced today the second release candidate of the upcoming XWayland 24.1… ⌘ Read more

Pop!_OS With Linux 6.8 Is Benefiting Older System76 Threadripper Systems Too
As noted at the end of March, System76’s Pop!_OS Linux distribution has upgraded to the Linux 6.8 kernel as a stable release update for this Ubuntu-derived distribution. That Linux 6.6 to 6.8 leap on Pop!_OS yielded some nice kernel performance improvements for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X available with their newest System76 Thelio Major workstations. But tests I’ve carried out of the Pop!_OS upgrade on a years older Syste … ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux Forms An HPC & AI SIG
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation today is announcing they are establishing a special interest group (SIG) to advance interests around high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) for this RHEL-derived operating system… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 24.1-rc2 Released With More Graphics Driver Fixes
Eric Engestrom has published Mesa 24.1-rc2 as the latest weekly release candidate of Mesa 24.1 as we work toward the stable release likely in the next week or two… ⌘ Read more

AMD 3rd Gen EPYC “Milan” Sees Some Performance Benefits To Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
With the recently released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I’ve shown various benchmarks how it can deliver nice performance gains over both Ubuntu 23.10 and the existing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on different platforms. Those benchmarks have tended to focus on the latest-generation processors/platforms given that’s where the excitement is these days. But for those on older platforms like AMD 3rd Gen EPYC “Milan” servers, here are some benchmarks looking at t … ⌘ Read more

NZXT Kraken 2023 AIO CPU Cooler Monitoring With Linux 6.10
Merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 was an NZXT Kraken hardware monitoring “HWMON” driver to support sensor monitoring of these all-in-one liquid cooling products from NZXT. Over time more NZXT Kraken AIO coolers have been supported by the Linux kernel and with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel the latest NZXT Kraken CPU coolers will be supported… ⌘ Read more

FSVERITY/DM-Verity Can Yield Much Better Performance With Multi-Buffer Hashing
In addition to recently working out AES-XTS implementations for AVX2, AVX-512, and other versions for speeding up disk/file encryption, Google’s Eric Biggers has additionally been working on some nice performance improvements for the Linux kernel’s DM-Verity code… ⌘ Read more

Valve Publishes Steam Survey Numbers For April 2024
For those that were hoping Steam on Linux numbers would crack the 2% marketshare for April, unfortunately, that didn’t happen… ⌘ Read more

Proposal Raised To Deprecate “-Ofast” For The LLVM/Clang Compiler
Some that crave the absolute best possible performance sometimes build their software with the “-Ofast” optimization level that is a step above “-O3” but comes with the risk of potentially unsafe math. LLVM developers are now weighing whether to deprecate -Ofast to either remove it or have it just be an alias for the -O3 optimizations… ⌘ Read more

SDL 3.1.2 Preview Prefers PipeWire Over PulseAudio, Fixes XWayland Mouse Warp
The newest SDL3 development release is out today with PipeWire preferred over PulseAudio and other changes… ⌘ Read more

Nano 8.0 Text Editor Released With Modern Bindings Option
Kicking off a new month of open-source releases is the release of the GNU Nano 8.0 text editor… ⌘ Read more

Serpent OS Close To Having A System Installer & Being Able To Test On Real Hardware
Serpent OS lead developer Ikey Doherty published a monthly status update for this original Linux distribution, which points to having a working OS installer soon so users can begin trying out this creation on real hardware… ⌘ Read more

PCI-SIG Provides CopprLink Cable Specs For PCIe 5.0 & PCIe 6.0
Last November the PCI-SIG announced CopprLink as the PCI Express cable name for both internal and external cabling. Today the embargo has lifted on the CopprLink cable specifications for both PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0… ⌘ Read more

Intel Baseline Profile Yields Odd Power/Performance On Linux
Intel motherboard manufacturers have begun rolling out BIOS updates containing an “Intel Baseline Profile” option to apply stock power limits to modern Intel processors. This is being driven by instability claims for 13th Gen and 14th Gen Intel Core processors having stability issues for some Windows gamers that is being attributed to multi-core enhancement (MCE) and other power options commonly set on enthusiast desktop motherboards. As the first … ⌘ Read more

Punting GPU Drivers From The Initramfs Due To Ever Increasing Firmware Bloat
For now Fedora / Red Hat is not making any immediate changes, but the ever increasing sizes of required GPU firmware files is causing Linux distribution vendors to re-think including GPU kernel graphics drivers as part of the initramfs… ⌘ Read more

Canonical Releases Landscape 24.04 LTS With New Snap Management, New Web Portal
Following last week’s release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical has now rolled out Landscape 24.04 LTS as the first long-term support version of this commercial software for managing a fleet of Ubuntu systems from a web-based portal. Landscape is part of the Ubuntu Pro subscription package and from the web-based environment makes it easier to manage Ubuntu systems in the enterprise… ⌘ Read more

DM-Crypt Adding “High Priority” Option In Linux 6.10
Queued up as part of the DeviceMapper dm-crypt changes for Linux 6.10 is adding a new “high priority” option… ⌘ Read more

DRM Buddy & AMDGPU Wired Up For Clear Page Tracking In Linux 6.10
Sent in to DRM-Next as part of last week’s drm-misc-next changes is implementing support for tracking cleared free memory and is initially wired up for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

XZ Backdoor, Nova Driver, Linux 6.9 Features & Ubuntu 24.04 Made For An Exciting April
April 2024 is now in the books after writing 257 original Linux/open-source-related news articles and another 13 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here’s a look back at the most exciting (popular) content from April… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Updates Cascadia Code: Its Open-Source Font For Developers
Back in 2019 Microsoft open-sourced Cascadia Code as a font designed for terminals and code editors. The goals are similar to that of Intel’s more recent One Mono as another open-source font for developers. It’s been three years since the last update to the Cascadia Code open-source font while today rolled out version 2404.23… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written Redox OS Gets USB Keyboards & Mice Working
Redox OS as the from-scratch, Rust-written open-source operating system had a successful April with now having USB keyboards and mice now working with their USB HID driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Looks To Fork More GNOME Software, Make XApp More Independent
Linux Mint published their monthly status update for April 2024 where they talk about ongoing testing for faster and more reliable repository access via the Fastly CDN to other more interesting software happenings like the likelihood that they will fork more GNOME applications as well as looking to make their XApp applications more distribution agnostic… ⌘ Read more

Noctua NH-L12Sx77 Makes For A Great Low-Profile CPU Cooler
Last week Noctua announced the NH-L12Sx77 low-profile CPU cooler as effectively an upgraded version of their NH-L12s CPU cooler that is now slightly taller to offer better performance and improved system compatibility. ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA RTX Remix 0.5 Released For Remastering Old Games
NVIDIA today released RTX Remix v0.5 as the newest version of this software for remastering old/classic games with path tracing. RTX Remix builds off DXVK and leverages NVIDIA Omniverse and other tech from the green giant like DLSS to enhance older games… ⌘ Read more

Radeon OpenGL Linux Driver Massively Improves 3D Texturing Performance For Older GPUs
Prominent open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has merged a new tantalizing set of patches that boost the 3D texturing performance for those using RDNA1 GPUs and older… ⌘ Read more

GCC 14.1 RC Compiler Available For Testing With AMD Znver5 Target & New C/C++ Features
The release candidate of the GCC 14 compiler is available for testing as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection… ⌘ Read more

TUXEDO Launches Another Linux Laptop Powered By The AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS
TUXEDO Computers a few weeks ago announced the first Linux laptop shipping with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840 series SoC and now they’ve announced another one powered by the latest Ryzen 7 8845HS… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Support Ongoing For The Arm-Based Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Laptop
Plans to have official support for the Arm-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen1 laptop in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS sadly didn’t pan out. But there is semi-working support available for running Ubuntu 24.04 on this Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 powered laptop… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Evaluates Replacing Redis With Valkey
Given the upstream Redis software licensing changes, Fedora is evaluating replacing Redis with the new Valkey project… ⌘ Read more

TornadoVM 1.0.4 Brings OpenJDK 22 Support, New Features For Java Heterogeneous Hardware
TornadoVM 1.0.4 is out today as the newest version of this solution for Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators. TornadoVM allows for nice Java heterogeneous hardware support and with the TornadoVM 1.0.4 brings yet more features… ⌘ Read more

KDE’s Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released After Six Year Hiatus - Now Ported To Qt5
Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.45 Released With Initial SHA1/SHA256 Interoperability & Reftable Support
Git 2.45 is out today as an important step forward for this widely-used, open-source distributed version control system… ⌘ Read more

openSUSE Leap 15.6 RC Brings Cockpit Web Based Server Management
The openSUSE Leap 15.6 based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP6 has graduated out of its beta phase and is onto the release candidate period. Notable with openSUSE Leap 15.6 is now having nice support for the Cockpit web-based server management solution… ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” Performance Improves With Linux 6.9
As part of my Linux 6.9 benchmarking I’ve been trying out many hardware combinations and overall seeing nice performance out of this kernel that will debut as stable in the next 2~3 weeks. AMD EPYC 4th Gen performance is boosted, Intel Xeon Max sees some AI improvements, and as shown in some prior Intel Core Ultra performance benchmarks is enhanced as well. Here are some more benchmarks looking at the Intel Core Ultra 7 “Meteor Lake” performanc … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi V3DV Vulkan Driver Implements Extended Dynamic State - Important For DXVK
Merged last week to Mesa 24.2-devel was an important merge request for the Broadcom V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the modern Raspberry Pi single board computers… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Isn’t Yet Recommending GNOME’s VRR Option
While GNOME landed experimental Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support in GNOME 46 that is used by the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical isn’t yet encouraging users to test out this option… ⌘ Read more

Linux Support On The Way For The ASUS ROG Raikiri Controller
Linux driver support is forthcoming for the ASUS ROG Raikiri gaming controller… ⌘ Read more

xconsole 1.1 Released - Preparing For Post-Y2038 Support, 18 Years After v1.0
Longtime X.Org maintainer Alan Coopersmith with Oracle released a new version of xconsole, the program that displays an X11 window containing the messages sent to /dev/console. This xconsole 1.1 release comes 18 years after the xconsole 1.0 release… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.10 Is The “Oracular Oriole”
For those keeping track of Ubuntu’s animal-themed codenames, Ubuntu 24.10 is now confirmed to be the Oracular Oriole… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc6 Released With This Kernel Looking “Pretty Normal”
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc6 as the latest weekly test release of Linux 6.9 as it works toward its stable release by mid-May… ⌘ Read more