Phoronix

KDE developers had a very busy week with a lot of new feature work continuing to land for Plasma 6.1 plus continuing to address bugs and other fallout from the recent Plasma 6 introduction...

APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There's big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it's certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter...

The XWayland 23.2 series was introduced last August while now release preparations have begun for releasing XWayland 24.1 as the next feature release for this X.Org Server derived code for allowing X11 clients (apps / games) to work within the confines of Wayland environments...

KDE Frameworks 6.1 is out today as the first monthly update since the release of KDE Frameworks 6.0 alongside KDE Plasma 6.0...

A patch to the Linux kernel's SLUB allocator has been queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window to help reduce memory consumption in extreme scenarios...

David Rheinsberg has released Dbus-Broker 36 as the newest version of this speedy, drop-in DBus implementation for Linux systems...

As the first new release since last September, LPython 0.21 has been released for this alpha-stage Python ahead-of-time compiler written in C++. LPython remains focused on providing "the best possible performance" especially for numerical use-cases, cross-platform compatibility, and hopes to be able to eventually transform Python code over to C++ and Fortran or other languages...

For the widely-used SDL hardware/software abstraction layer that is commonly used by cross-platform games, the upcoming SDL 3.0 release now has the logic to be able to prefer using PipeWire directly rather than PulseAudio when successfully detecting the presence of PipeWire...

While TUXEDO Computers has already been offering powerful AMD Zen 4 laptops such as the Pulse 14 Gen 3 with Ryzen 7 7840HS SoC, today the Bavarian company announced their first Ryzen 8000 series mobile laptop...

Intel's software team is today sharing their newest innovation for achieving greater performance on Linux systems: the Thin Layout Optimizer. Intel's Thin Layout Optimizer is inspired by the likes of the Meta/LLVM BOLT optimizer and Google's Propeller but aims to be much easier to use while still delivering measurable performance gains for optimized binaries...

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS due out later this month and the beta now available, I've been spending more time recently testing out the latest development state for this next Long Term Support installment of Ubuntu Linux. Similar to seeing some Ubuntu 24.04 performance gains on server class hardware both from Intel and AMD, testing on workstation hardware is also showing some gains over the current Ubuntu 23.10 release. Here are some comparison tests of the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.

For those trying to use the X.Org Server's GLAMOR accelerated 2D rendering on legacy/obsolete GPUs, there's now a fallback in place to allow software rendering to work when encountering crippled hardware...

While GNU Hurd continues having a tough time on x86 support and GNU Hurd x86_64 is being worked toward, the GCC 14 compiler has been working on compiler toolchain support for GNU Hurd AArch64...

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta release is now available for testing ahead of the official release later this month for this new Long Term Support release of Ubuntu Linux...

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa, RADV, has merged its support for handling Vulkan Video accelerated encoding for H.264 and H.265...

Wayland 1.22 released at the start of April 2023 while now Wayland 1.23 is taking shape as the next version of this core Wayland code...

Last week Bcachefs' repair code was largely completed and in good shape for merging with the Linux 6.9-rc3 kernel. Bcachefs patches last week amounted to about one third of the kernel changes for the week. This week is a new round of fixes to further stabilize the experimental file-system...

A new release of Lutris is now available, the open-source game manager that's popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for managing games from Steam, GOG, a number of retro game consoles and emulators, and other sources from one convenient UI...

A day after explicit sync support was merged for XWayland, a week after explicit sync support for Mesa Vulkan drivers hit Mesa 24.1, and GNOME's Mutter enabling explicit sync at the end of March, KDE's KWin compositor has now merged its Wayland explicit sync support!..

Mesa's Lavapipe driver as a software (CPU-based) implementation of the Vulkan API has now implemented support for ray-tracing pipelines...