Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 32 min 14 sec ago
Snapdragon X Elite Laptop Experience Still Lackluster On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I've been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite SoC to see how its performing under Linux now and against the AMD/Intel competition. Unfortunately, it's regressed even further than the last round of testing.
AMD EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" Confirmed With ACE, Next-Gen Memory
After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" details as well as EPYC Zen 8 "Ravenna" being in development...
AMD Announces ROCm.AI As AI-Driven Platform For Developers
In addition to Instinct MI455X and Helios launching along with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors, AMD used their annual Advancing AI day to announce ROCm.AI as an AI-driven platform for developers...
AMD EPYC 9006 Venice Announced & Looks Poised To Be A Grand Slam
While AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" launched just under two years ago, it has aged remarkably well. It is one of the few CPU generations in my past 22 years of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking that has still captivated me two years on in finding still typically industry-leading performance across varying workloads, exceptional reliability, and all around a very robust platform. Today though at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su formally announced EPYC 9006 "Venice" for taking their server offerings to the next level in the agentic AI era.
AMD Launches Instinct MI455X, Helios AI Rack
Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI 2026 just launched the new Instinct MI455X GPUs and the Helios rack...
FreeBSD Ports Currently Frozen Due To A Very Large Commit
The FreeBSD project issued a statement today over the FreeBSD Ports repository having been frozen for the past two days. The freeze is not due to a malicious compromise but rather a very large commit breaking things...
Fedora 45 Atomic Desktops Look To Allow For Web-Based Remote Installations
One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora Linux 45 is for supporting web-based remote installations of Fedora Atomic Desktop images...
Ryzen AI Software 1.8 Released With New Model Support, More Optimizations
Ahead of Lisa Su's keynote this morning at the AMD Advancing AI event, tagged on GitHub just now was the Ryzen AI Software 1.8 release for helping to deploy AI models on Ryzen AI PCs...
LLVM 23.1-rc1 Released With AMD Zen 6 & AVX-512 BMM Support, Other Compiler Enhancements
Following the recent code branching for the LLVM 23 series, LLVM 23.1-rc1 was released today in working toward the next stable release of this open-source compiler stack...
dav1d 1.5.4 Brings AV1 Decoding To OS/2
While the VideoLAN developers are busy these days working on dav2d for AV2 video decoding, they haven't let up work on dav1d and recently released dav1d 1.5.4 for continuing to enhance this leading open-source, CPU-based AV1 decoder...
Lemonade 11.5 Local AI Server Released With Completed Lemonade Router
Just one week after releasing Lemonade 11.0, the Lemonade 11.5 local AI server was released today for this open-source AMD backed project during their AMD Advancing AI event...
SDL Lands HDR10 Rendering Support
Sam Lantinga of Valve and SDL fame has landed HDR10 rendering support into the Simple DirectMedia Library...
COSMIC Epoch 1.4 Released With More Fixes, Force Quit For COSMIC Monitor
System76 developers today released COSMIC Epoch 1.4 as the newest stable release to their Rust-based desktop environment...
AMD EPYC Turin With PCIe 5.0 Storage Shows Off Nice Gains On Linux 7.2
Earlier this week was an exciting look at Intel Xe3 graphics performance gains on Linux 7.2 with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware. On the other side of the table, with AMD hardware on this forthcoming kernel an area to be excited about are some I/O improvements at least for 5th Gen EPYC with speedy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage.
libx11-compat Is Working To Implement Xlib Atop SDL For Wayland, macOS, Android
For helping to keep X11 clients running in a modern Linux desktop world with Wayland or even for running on macOS or Android, there is now yet-another option being developed with libx11-compat. The libx11-compat project is working to re-implement the Xlib client library atop SDL2/SDL3 interfaces for allow broad underlying platform coverage...
Intel Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts Slated For Linux 7.3
Back in March Intel software engineers began sending out Linux patches for Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts as a new capability with recent Intel processors. This notable efficiency improvement is now queued for introduction in the Linux 7.3 cycle once its merge window opens in a month...
The "New Normal" Of Audio Quirks Submitted For Linux 7.2-rc5
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE sent out this week's batch of sound fixes that he describes as "A collection of fixes that have been accumulated recently. The amount is still "new normal", but all small fixes. Mostly hardware-specific quirks, but including a few core fixes, too." The "new normal" has been a common phrase recently to reflect the increased tempo of patches as well as security/bug disclosures all due to the increased pace of AI/LLM activity...
Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 10-Inch Model Launches
Following the launch of the 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 and the 5-inch display variant, Raspberry Pi announced today the addition of a 10-inch model...
Cryptsetup 2.8.7 Released To Deal With Fallout Of Linux's Rushed AF_ALG Deprecation
Linux's cryptsetup for configuring and managing encrypted storage devices is ready with a new version as the developers work to deal with the recent deprecation of the Linux AF_ALG interface...
Three New Ubuntu Snap Vulnerabilities Made Public - One Dates Back To Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Canonical today disclosed three new Snap security vulnerabilities affecting snapd. Two are rated high impact vulnerabilities while the third is considered medium but covers all Ubuntu releases of the past decade going back to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...
