Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 40 min ago
AMD HDR/Color Improvement For Their Linux Driver & KDE - Co-Developed By Claude Code
Introduced with Linux 6.19 was the long in development DRM Color Pipeline API while it's not the end of the road yet on enhancing the Linux desktop for modern high dynamic range (HDR) displays and color pipeline handling. AMD engineer Harry Wentland has more improvements pending for the AMDGPU driver as well as example compositor/desktop-side integration with KDE's KWin...
AMD, NVIDIA, OpenAI & Others Form An Optical Scale-up Consortium
AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI jointly announced today the formation of the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) optical scale-up consortium...
Radeon "RADV" Vulkan Driver Finally Lands VK_KHR_copy_memory_indirect
In Mesa 26.1 the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has finally landed support for the VK_KHR_copy_memory_indirect extension that was introduced to the Vulkan API last year...
Mesa 26.0.2 Has Plenty Of Graphics Driver Fixes From Intel & RADV Vulkan To Old R300g
Mesa 26.0.2 is now available as the latest bi-weekly stable point release for this set of open-source graphics drivers predominantly used on Linux systems...
Qt Creator 19 IDE Released With Minimap, Built-In MCP Server For AI / LLMs
Qt developers today released Qt Creator 19 as the newest version of this cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE)...
Fwupd 2.1.1 Released With Lots Of New Hardware Support
Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced the release of Fwupd 2.1.1 as the newest feature update to this solution for deploying system firmware updates and other device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux. Paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), Fwupd has made firmware updating a breeze on Linux for an increasing number of devices...
Igalia Developing Moonforge As New Linux Distribution
Linux consulting firm Igalia announced this week Moonforge, a new in-house Linux distribution by them based on Yocto and OpenEmbedded...
OBS Studio 32.1 Released With WebRTC Simulcast Support
OBS Studio 32.1 is now available for this popular cross-platform desktop screen recording app that is also popular with game live-streaming and other uses...
Exclusive Preview Of System76's Completely Redesigned Thelio Desktop
It has been eight years already since System76 announced Thelio as their own built-in-the-USA, custom-engineered cases for desktops and workstations. System76 Thelio is an open hardware design and built exceptionally well out of their facilities in Colorado. System76 Thelio has served them well for their range of desktop systems over the years from ARM64 developer workstations to high-end AMD Linux systems. Now though they are preparing to introduce their next-generation Thelio design. Ahead of the announcement next week, here is an exclusive first look at the next-gen Thelio hardware.
AMD Ryzen AI NPUs Are Finally Useful Under Linux For Running LLMs
Over the past two years AMD has developed the AMDXDNA accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. But when it comes to user-space software on Linux actually able to leave the Ryzen AI NPUs it's been... extremely limited with nothing really useful besides some niche bits of code. Even AMD's own software like their GAIA on Linux has used Vulkan with their iGPUs rather than any NPU support. But finally today there is a significant shift with the Ryzen AI NPUs becoming useful on Linux and able to handle LLMs...
Ubuntu 26.04 With GNOME 50 Offering Some Performance Benefits For NVIDIA Linux Gaming
With GNOME 50 that is being used by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, you may be curious about the out-of-the-box performance especially compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases -- especially with Mutter 50 having some NVIDIA optimizations. In today's article is a first look at how the NVIDIA Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu 26.04 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.10 release.
D7VK 1.5 Released With Direct3D 3 Now Implemented Over Vulkan
The open-source D7VK project began to implement Direct3D 7 over Vulkan similar to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton providing support for newer Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan. With succeeding releases D7VK was extended to Direct3D 6 too and then Direct3D 5 support. Now with today's D7VK 1.5 release, Direct3D 3 is implemented for faster acceleration using Vulkan...
Intel Posts New Linux Graphics Driver Patches For Improved Adaptive Sync Support
Posted today were new Intel kernel graphics driver patches for Linux to enable Adaptive Sync SDP (Secondary Data Packet) handling for Panel Replay and Auxless Adaptive Link Power Management (ALPM) modes...
Linux Patches Make The IPv6 Stack Less Modular To Lower Architectural Burden
Currently the Linux IPv6 networking stack can be built into the Linux kernel, built as a loadable kernel module, or not built at all. With proposed patches from a SUSE engineer, the IPv6 networking stack would be limited to being a kernel built-in or not at all. In doing away with IPv6 as a loadable kernel module would allow simplifying some code and lowering the Linux networking maintenance burden...
AlmaLinux To Focus On Increased Testing & Other Goals For 2026
Developers behind AlmaLinux as this popular community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) have drafted some new goals for 2026...
Linux's KVM Virtualization Preparing For Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) debuting with Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids is ready with Linux 6.16+ and recent open-source compilers. One piece of the support puzzle still coming together though that will be especially important for Xeon Diamond Rapids is the KVM virtualization support. New patches there were posted this week...
Azure Linux 3.0 Enables Core Scheduling, More Tracing Capabilities
Microsoft on Tuesday released Azure Linux 3.0.20260304 as the newest monhtly update to their in-house Linux platform...
Fedora Evaluating New Idea For For Experimental Concepts & Fostering New Innovations
Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta announced a new proposal for "A Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process for Fedora." With the help of Google's Gemini AI, Spaleta laid out a proposal to help Fedora make greater accommodations for experimental concepts and building more interest around innovative ideas without a firm commitment to integrate them into Fedora proper until they can be assured of sustainability...
Current RISC-V CPUs Being Too Slow Causes Headaches For Fedora: ~5x Slower Builds
The current crop of RISC-V SoCs are still much slower than alternative CPU architectures and lead to much longer build times for Fedora packages as a result. There's hope with next-gen RISC-V processors being faster but for now even compiling Binutils as an example is around five times slower than x86_64 -- and that's with disabling compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) for RISC-V to avoid an even longer build process...
MSI PRO B850-P WiFi: A Special AMD Ryzen AM5 Motherboard For Linux / Open-Source Enthusiasts
The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI motherboard is a unique AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard for Linux/open-source enthusiasts that is competitively priced at just $179 USD. It's interesting not because of the doings of MSI but rather 3mdeb with this being the desktop motherboard they are working on porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to for allowing an open-source firmware stack.
