
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 4 min ago
Servo Browser Engine Now Rendering Gmail & Google Chat, Decides Against AI Contributions
The Servo browser engine project has published a status update outlining some of the enhancements made over the past two months for this Rust-based web layout engine. This includes hitting a notable milestone that some websites like Gmail and Google Chat can now render correctly...
FreeBSD 14.3 Beta 2 Brings WiFi Fixes, Reproducible ARM64 Kernel Binary Build
The second beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing as an incremental update to this BSD operating system and ahead of the feature-rich FreeBSD 15.0 due out later in 2025...
GNOME Showtime Accepted As Video Player App For GNOME 49
Back in January you may recall the news of GNOME's Showtime app looking to replace Totem as the default video player. That didn't happen in time for GNOME 48 back in March but this week all the formalities were met that Showtime has been cleared to replace the outdated Totem with GNOME 49...
Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 G81SF 4K UHD HDR Monitor
With modern Linux distributions beginning to see good support for HDR displays, if you have been looking to upgrade to a high dynamic range OLED monitor, one of the newest options that recently launched by Samsung is the Odyssey OLED G8 G81SF. I've been testing out the Samsung G81SF the past few weeks and it's been working out well paired with the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 to deliver a beautiful desktop experience and a great experience for Linux gamers with supporting a 240Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro.
RADV Vulkan Driver Lands BFloat16 Support In Mesa 25.2
Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 "BF16" operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is the newest wiring up support for VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16...
DeepComputing's DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard II For Framework Laptop Launches For $349
The past year we've been looking forward to a RISC-V motherboard option coming to the Framework Laptop 13 via Framework's partnership with DeepComputing. There was early access in late 2024 while this week DeepComputing has formally announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC Mainboard II now available at $349 USD...
Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 Released
Out this morning is the Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 release as the newest version of their user-space Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver code that interfaces with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver...
Debian Looks To Better Address Ill-Maintained / Dormant Packages
Newly re-elected Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille posted today to the project's mailing list a few updates about different happenings in the Debian world ahead of the Debian 13 "Trixie" release due out in the coming months and also with DebConf 25 happening this July in Brest, France...
Intel Xe Driver With Linux 6.16 Brings Controls For PCIe Link Downgrading On Battlemage
In addition to the Intel LOBF feature and some other last minute Intel fixes going into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) tree ahead of Linux 6.16, a final batch of material for the newer Xe kernel graphics driver was also sent out this week...
Mesa's Lavapipe Driver Wires Up More Features Used By VKD3D-Proton
Mesa developer Konstantin Seurer has been adding more features to the Lavapipe Vulkan driver for functionality needed by VKD3D-Proton for mapping Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan...
Hyprland 0.49 Wayland Compositor Working On Permission Management & New Protocols
Hyprland 0.49 released on Thursday as the newest version of this unique Wayland compositor project...
Steam Deck Adds Battery Maximum Charge Limit Control In Newest Beta
After being speculated that such a feature would surface the past few months, today's updated Steam Deck Client Beta from Valve introduces a battery charge limit control to help preserve the longevity of your Steam Deck's battery...
Intel Begins Posting Linux Patches For Wildcat Lake
While there have been many Linux kernel patches being worked on for months now for Intel's upcoming Panther Lake SoCs, only seeing the first Linux kernel patches today is their Wildcat Lake platform...
Intel Link-Off Between Frames "LOBF" Submitted For Linux 6.16 Graphics Driver
A new Intel graphics/display driver feature being enabled for Linux 6.16 is LOBF: Link-Off Between Frames...
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel
June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially -- and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet -- being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here's a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.
Few Apple Silicon Device Tree Updates Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.16
Sven Peter has mailed out the Device Tree "DT" updates for benefiting Apple Silicon hardware with the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window...
OpenRazer 3.10.3 Brings Linux Driver Support For Razer's Naga V2 Pro & Strider Chroma
OpenRazer 3.10.3 was released on Wednesday as the newest update to this set of open-source, community-maintained and out-of-tree drivers for Razer hardware on Linux...
Linux 6.16 Bringing A Fix For Old Intel Haswell Graphics
With the Linux 6.15-rc6 kernel release due out on Sunday, we're hitting the transition point where the focus on DRM kernel graphics drivers for Linux 6.16 is shifting from feature work to bug-fixing ahead of this next merge window. As such sent out today were drm-misc-next and drm-intel-gt-next pull requests focused on preparing various kernel graphics/display driver fixes for the new code coming to Linux 6.16. The Intel pull request today even contains a fix for aging Intel Haswell graphics...
DragonFlyBSD Sees Progress On UVC Webcam Support
For those with a common USB Video Class "UVC" web camera, it could soon finally see support under the DragonFlyBSD operating system...
Mesa 25.2 Merges AMD Support For Setting Queue Priorities
Going along with new AMDGPU kernel driver patches on their way to the mainline kernel with Linux 6.16, the Mesa 25.2 user-space driver code has landed the infrastructure for being able to set queue priorities as well as secure queues...