Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 32 min ago
Vim Patches Yielding Faster GTK3 Wayland Performance: "Major Milestone"
For those using Vim with its GTK3 toolkit interface on Wayland, it soon should be delivering much better performance with pending patches...
Nourish: A New Wayland Compositor Powered By Vulkan With Infinite Scrolling/Panning
The newest Wayland compositor on the block is Nourish, it's a Vulkan-powered and its unique selling point is offering "infinite" zooming and panning to in effect provide an infinite workspace...
Reserved THP Feature Proposed For Linux To Combine The Best Of HugeTLB & THP
Linux kernel developer and Bytedance engineer Qi Zheng sent out a request for comments (RFC) patch series on a new feature called Reserved THP to combine the best of HugeTLB and THP kernel functionality...
Linux MD RAID5 Seeing Scalability Improvements Up To 17%
Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was a new patch series working on scalability enhancements to the MD RAID5 software RAID code. Up to a 10~17% improvement was observed in some configurations with these RAID5 scalability patches...
GNOME AI Assistant Adds Image Generation Support
In development over the past three years has been Newelle as a GNOME-aligned AI virtual assistant. Out this week is Newelle 1.4.5 and it now adds AI image generation support and a redesigned chat interface...
KDE Plasma 6.7.2 To Fix KWin's Most Common Crash, Plasma 6.8 To Not Crash When Ejecting CDs
While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only...
COSMIC's New System Monitor Is Looking Very Slick
Not only is GNOME 51 working to replace GNOME System Monitor with its new replacement, but over in System76's COSMIC space they have been baking their own new system monitor too...
Shotcut 26.6 Released With HDR Improvements, Vulkan Display On Linux
Shotcut 26.6 is out today as the newest major feature release for this popular cross-platform, open-source video editing solution...
New Intel Linux Driver Patches Enable HDR Over DP MST Connections
One of the limitations of the Intel Linux driver's high dynamic range (HDR) display support is that it currently doesn't work for any DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport "DP MST" connections, such as for daisy chaining monitors or multi-monitor docking stations. But the good news is patches are being worked on to address this Intel Linux kernel display driver shortcoming...
How NVIDIA GB10 CPU Performance Compares To Vera
Since delivering NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks one month ago and follow-ups like how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved in 8 years or how Vera compares to Ampere Altra that is still quite common in the marketplace, another frequent discussion point and inquiry is about the performance of NVIDIA Vera relative to NVIDIA's GB10 chip. For those curious about the per-core performance and the like, here are some benchmarks of the GB10 up against those initial Vera results.
More AMD Zen 6 Prepping, Many ASUS / Lenovo / HP Laptop Improvements For Linux 7.2
The many x86 platform driver changes have now been merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. As usual it's mostly made up of driver enhancements for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen (AI) and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops...
Experimental Code Enables Per-Monitor Backgrounds For GNOME Shell
One of the limitations of GNOME's current multi-monitor handling is that the same background is used across the displays. For those that want to enjoy per-monitor background selection, some experimental / proof-of-concept code is now working to allow such per-monitor backgrounds to work with the modern GNOME desktop...
Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Now Enables Descriptor Heaps By Default
Back in early May was the experimental enabling of Vulkan descriptor heaps for the Intel ANV open-source driver. After nearly two months of continued testing and improvements, the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap support for Intel graphics on Linux is now enabled by default...
Linux 7.2 Fixes Where PCIe Devices Could Be Inadvertently Restricted To 2.5 GT/s
The PCI/PCIe subsystem changes have been merged this week as we approach the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window...
Intel ISPC 1.31 Brings New Targets For Nova Lake, Experimental PowerPC 64-bit
Intel engineers on Thursday released the newest version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, ISPC. The ISPC 1.31 supports their variant of the C programming language with extensions for Single Program, Multiple Data programming for leveraging their range of CPU and GPU hardware...
Linux 7.2 Adds New Driver For Wacom W9000 Pen-Enabled Touchscreens
The input subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.2, which is seeing its merge window wrap up on Sunday. Most notable with the input updates is the introduction of the "wacom_w9000" for supporting newer, pen-enabled touchscreens...
Coreboot 26.06 Brings Support For Intel Nova Lake, AMD Strix Halo & 31 New Boards
Coreboot 26.06 is out today as the latest quarterly feature release for this software project providing open-source system firmware support for a growing number of platforms...
Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 Released For Monthly Testing
Daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" continue to be published, but for those preferring something a bit more regulated, out today is Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 as the second monthly ISO image...
Linux Foundation & Others Launch "Akrites" To Defend Open-Source Software From AI-Enabled Exploits
The Linux Foundation along with others like Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others have joined forces to launch Akrites. The Akrites project is aiming to help defend critical open-source software from the brisk pace of new AI/LLM-discovered software bugs and vulnerabilities in ensuring that said issues are effectively addressed before they can be exploited by bad actors...
DXVK 3.0 Released With DXBC-SPIRV For Shader Compilation, Descriptor Heaps By Default
Philip Rebohle announced the release today of DXVK 3.0 as the latest major feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation atop the Vulkan API for use by Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...
