Open-source News

It's been another busy week in the KDE space as Plasma developers continue working on new feature activity for the big Plasma 6.7 release...

Framework is funding KDE to build Linux laptops you can actually customize  xda-developers.com

Linux for smartphones: Ubuntu Touch makes the Volla Phone Quintus a rare alternative in the mass market  igor´sLAB

Using FireWire On A Raspberry Pi Before Linux Drops Support  Hackaday

Developers behind the Distributed Replicated Block Device "DRBD" for mirroring block devices between multiple host systems are working to resync the upstream Linux kernel DRBD support with the out-of-tree DRBD code they have been maintaining for the past ~15 years out-of-sync. It's a big undertaking but they have begun staging patches for review and testing to get this massive set of changes up to par for mainline...

Framework Computer as the company behind the modular Framework laptops and incredible Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop has stepped up their support for the KDE community...

Framework Computer Steps Up Their Support For KDE  Phoronix

Arch, Garuda, and other distributors clash over mandatory birth date fields  TechRadar

Mixxx 2.5.6 Open-Source DJ App Improves Controller Mapping Support and Effects  9to5Linux

Linux Terminal Finally Gets Some Love with One UI 8.5  SammyGuru

Major Linux kernel dev says we 'can't ignore' AI as it's actually useful now  PC Gamer

Espionage campaign targets telecom with stealthy Linux-based backdoor  Cybersecurity Dive

Codenotary launches AgentX for Linux security automation  SecurityBrief Australia

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6's performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.

KDE Plasma 6.6 Showing Frequent Performance Advantage Over GNOME 50 With NVIDIA R595 Driver  Phoronix

One UI 8.5 brings major Linux Terminal upgrades to Galaxy devices  SamMobile

Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM...

Intel Xe Driver Improves Memory Pressure / Out-Of-Memory Behavior For vRAM With Linux 7.1  Phoronix

I stopped using Snap — Flatpak just works better  MakeUseOf

Samsung’s One UI 8.5 Update Supercharges the Built-in Linux Terminal  androidheadlines.com