Phoronix

With the latest Mesa 23.2 code as of Friday there is now a rather significant performance optimization for Intel's graphics driver stack that really helps out Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist along with upcoming Meteor Lake graphics. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, for example, was found to be 11% faster now with this single driver change and other Vulkan apps/games benefiting as well...

The KDE Plasma 6 desktop is becoming more "livable" and each week new features continue to be implemented. This week was another lively phase of development toward Plasma 6.0...

Similar to LLVM Clang 17 adding -std=c++26 support as the open-source compiler begins work on the next major revision of the C++ programming language, the GCC 14 compiler code has now also added the -std=c++26 compiler option...

A new bi-weekly release of Wine is now available for enjoying Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

Earlier this year Intel software engineers published a blazing fast AVX-512 sorting library that was initially picked up by Numpy where it netted them 10~17x faster sorts. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 2.0 with even more AVX-512 features in place and additional sorting algorithms added...

The Firewalld open-source firewall daemon has been in development since 2011 while only two years ago did it reach the Firewalld 1.0 milestone. Thus it was a bit surprising to find Firewalld 2.0 being released today...

The Fedora Sericea and Sway spins are eyeing the possibility of shipping without the xorg-x11 packages for being the first X.Org-less desktop spins in the Fedora Linux world...

Among the early pull requests already submitted for the Linux 6.5 merge window that is expected to open next week are the Linux NFS server (NFSD) changes. Notable this cycle is the NFSD and RDMA server code having better NUMA awareness...

SDDM as the QML-based X11 and Wayland display manager commonly used on KDE systems and elsewhere is finally out with a new release...

Merged this week into the GNOME Mutter compositor codebase is what should be a beneficial optimization for those enjoying Linux gaming under the GNOME Wayland session...

Mesa has switched from SHA1 to BLAKE3 for its shader hashing to deliver better performance...

FLAC 1.4.3 is out today as the first update to this Xiph.Org royalty-free, lossless audio codec since last October...

A change proposal that hopes to take place for Fedora 39 would make it easier to have an optionally GRUB-free system by instead performing a clean install with systemd-boot for booting on EFI platforms...

Many readers have been curious about the performance of Linux gaming on the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld that out-of-the-box runs Microsoft Windows 11 Home... Well, the wait is over with the first benchmarks today of Windows 11 against Ubuntu 23.04 Linux on the ROG Ally. Beyond looking at the out-of-the-box performance, the results under Windows 11 with ASUS' "Turbo Mode" is also included plus some modifications to allow Linux to be more competitive to Windows 11 for games.

Wasmer is an open-source WebAssembly implementation that is focused on running sandboxed applications everywhere thanks to the power of WASM while being as performant as traditional native applications. Today marks the availability of Wasmer 4.0 as another step forward for this project...

AlmaLinux, the popular community-oriented distribution that was established following Red Hat's decision to discontinue development on CentOS (non-Stream) and is backed by AMD and other organizations, is trying to chart its path forward following Red Hat's latest curve ball...

Going back a few years there has been experimental development around a Vulkan back-end for KDE's KWin compositor while now a road-map is being formalized for actually bringing Vulkan support to fruition...

Sent in today for the mainline Linux kernel -- days ahead of the expected Linux 6.4 stable release -- is a crash fix for just-released AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops...

Xonotic 0.8.6 is out as the latest update to this long-running, open-source first person shooter game...

Ahead of the Linux 6.5 merge window expected to open up next week, a patch providing sound quirks for the ASUS ROG Ally's CS35l41 audio is now queued in the sound subsystem's for-next branch...