Phoronix

In addition to KDE Plasma 6.0, another exciting desktop milestone we can look forward to in 2024 is the COSMIC desktop from System76 when they end up releasing the next Pop!_OS based upon Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The Pop!_OS / COSMIC developers continue making great progress on their Rust-written desktop environment...

Intel engineers have merged to Mesa 23.3 the initial open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver support for sparse resources! This is the important feature needed for running a number of newer Direct3D 12 games with Steam Play (Proton) via VKD3D-Proton with Intel graphics hardware...

After a difficult few years of global supply chain woes leading to limited available and heightened retail pricing on the Raspberry Pi single board computers, today there is finally an update to the family. Four years after the Raspberry Pi 4 shipped, today the Raspberry Pi 5 is launching with a much improved SoC leading to significant performance gains. Additional improvements with the Raspberry Pi 5 make this a very nice generational upgrade.

Following the Counter-Strike 2 limited test since March, Counter-Strike 2 is now officially released and there is also a SteamOS/Linux build now available...

As some complementary data points to yesterday's Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD Linux laptop review, here is a look at how the out-of-the-box Microsoft Windows 11 Pro performance compares to that of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 on this AMD Ryzen 7 7840U "Phoenix" laptop.

CodeWeavers -- in addition to contributing significantly to upstream Wine and being involved with Valve on Proton for Steam Play -- continues to offer CrossOver as a premium Wine-based software solution for enjoying Windows games and applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe products on Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS. Out today is CrossOver 23.5 as the latest evolution of this Wine-based commercial software...

The Servo browser engine has been seeing renewed development activity and interest since it was transferred to the Linux Foundation Europe and has attracted contributions from the likes of the Igalia consulting firm. Last week at the Open Source Summit Europe, an update on Servo was presented...

Ahead of the planned stable release in October, the openSUSE Leap Micro 5.5 Beta was published today for this lightweight Linux operating system built for containers and virtualized workloads...

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 6 has been released as the latest version of this Linux Mint derivative that is based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu...

Earlier this month I noted that Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers had begun working on the OpenGL and Vulkan Mesa driver support for Xe 2 graphics as to be found with Lunar Lake "LNL" processors. Since then the initial hardware enablement work has only continued heating up...

Version 0.8 of uvg266 as one of the leading Versatile Video Codec (VVC) / H.266 open-source video encoders is now available...

TuxClocker has been in development for several years as another open-source GPU overclocking GUI for Linux. TuxClocker initially provided a Qt5-based user interface for GPU overclocking and ultimately established a D-Bus API as well with the new release. TuxClocker 1.0 was finally released today as the latest update to this Linux GPU overclocking software...

A new version of the sdl12-compat library is now available, which serves as an SDL2 portability layer for allowing old SDL 1.2.x games and applications work on modern SDL2 systems...

The past few weeks I've been putting the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD mobile workstation through its paces that is powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U SoC. Besides uncovering one BIOS issue that is in the process of being resolved, this latest-generation AMD-powered laptop that features 64GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and integrated Radeon graphics with 2.8K OLED display has been working out well on modern Linux distributions. Here's a look at this AMD Zen 4 laptop running on Linux and plenty of performance benchmarks for this laptop.

For a year and a half now Pensando has been working on enabling their Elba SoC support for the mainline Linux kernel - a process that coincidentally began just days after AMD announced it was acquiring Pensando. Over the past 18 months the AMD-Pensando Elba SoC enablement work has now been through 16 rounds of code review but still isn't over the finish line yet but some of the initial enablement code might finally land with Linux 6.7...

The first of three parts for MSG_ZEROCOPY preparations for the VirtIO-Vsock driver have been queued into net-next ahead of planned introduction in the Linux 6.7 kernel as another means of achieving greater performance within virtual machines...

Intel's open-source software engineers are known for many great performance optimizations to the Linux kernel. Over the years Intel has contributed countless performance optimizations to the kernel and related Linux components that have made significant improvements not only for Intel hardware but x86_64 as a whole and at times CPU architecture independent improvements. One of their newest performance optimizing patch series is around Per-CPU Pageset (PCP) high auto-tuning...

Announced last year at the Intel Vision conference was the Habana Labs Gaudi2 and Greco AI hardware. Since then we've seen a lot of Linux kernel driver work happen for enabling the Gaudi2 second-generation training and inference AI processor while there hasn't been anything real in the way for Greco, which was the successor to the Goya AI processor. Now references to Habana Labs Greco are being removed from the driver...

Qt 6.6 is nearing release for this open-source and cross-platform toolkit while out this morning is the release candidate...

A major update to OCRmyPDF is now available, the open-source project that can work on scanned PDFs and other PDF documents to add an optical character recognition (OCR) text layer to files for allowing them to be searched or copy-pasted. OCRmyPDF makes it a breeze in dealing with scanned PDF text files and now with OCRmyPDF v15 is even better...