Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 22 min ago
Ubuntu 25.04's GNOME Web Browser Will Be Able To Play More Web Videos By Default
Those making use of the GNOME Web "Epiphany" web browser with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will be able to enjoy playing more popular web videos thanks to a packaging change...
Arm Mali Panfrost Driver Lands OpenCL C Support In Mesa 25.1
The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has merged initial OpenCL C infrastructure into Mesa 25.1 for allowing OpenCL compute on Arm Mali graphics using this open-source Linux driver stack...
FLAC 1.5 Finally Delivers Multi-Threaded Encoding
FLAC 1.5 is out today as the newest feature update to the software built around the Free Lossless Audio Codec...
KDE Plasma 6.3 Released With Improved Fractional Scaling & Other Enhancements
Out just ahead of Valentine's Day is the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop release for further advancing this Qt6/KF6-based open-source desktop...
AMD AOMP 20.0-2 Compiler Adds The "flang-new" Fortran Compiler Option
AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware...
BeOS-Inspired Haiku OS Starts 2025 Off Introducing An AMD CPU Temperature Driver
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their January 2025 status report that outlines all of the interesting work over the past month...
Systemd Adding The Ability to Boot Directly Into A Disk Image Downloaded Via HTTP
Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability to let systemd boot directly into a disk image downloaded via HTTP within the initial RAM disk (initrd) during the Linux boot process...
Firefox ForkServer Getting Ready To Enhance Linux Browser Performance
Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win...
Intel's Newest Open-Source Project Is "Polite Guard"
Intel's newest open-source project and addition to their AI offerings is... Polite Guard...
Apple Touch Bar Backlight & Keyboard Mode Drivers Slated For Linux 6.15
For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle...
GIMP 3.0 RC3 Released For A Final Round Of Testing
GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop...
Python 3.14 Lands A New Interpreter With 3~30% Faster Python Code
Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler but for maximum performance benefits Python should be built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO)...
Union Hopes To Address KDE's Fragmented Ways Of Styling Apps
KDE/Qt apps can be styled many different ways with Qt widgets, SVG-based styling, Qt Quick, and other routes for styling of applications. That fragmentation of different ways to styling KDE apps can probe problematic for UI designs and lead to a less cohesive user experience. KDE developer Arjen Hiemstra is hoping to change that with the Union project...
Formerly Known As YQPkg, Myrlyn Package Manager GUI Adds Repository Configuration
You may recall the YQPkg package management tool announced last year that's been talked up by openSUSE developers as a Qt-based package manager GUI and alternative to YaST. It's now known as Myrlyn and has added repository configuration as its newest feature...
New Proposal To Raise The Linux Kernel's Default Timer Frequency To 1000Hz
A patch sent out on Sunday by Google engineer Qais Yousef is proposing to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz...
RADV Vulkan Video Adds Low Latency Encoding Support
Adding to the Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is honoring of the low latency encoding options...
Microsoft Continues Enhancing Its Azure Linux 3.0 Distribution With February Update
Microsoft engineers released Azure Linux 3.0.20250206 overnight as the newest monthly update to this in-house Microsoft Linux distribution that is used within their Azure cloud infrastructure and a variety of other purposes at the Redmond company...
Linux 6.14-rc2 Released With Apple Silicon Maintainer Change, Bcachefs Fixes
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.14 is now available for testing as a rather light update for the week...
Linux Patches Adjust AC Plug/Unplug Behavior During s2idle To Match Windows
A set of patches sent out on Saturday by AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello seek to adjust the Linux behavior for laptops/handhelds during AC plug/unplug events during s2idle to better match that of Microsoft Windows 11...
Curious Intel Linux Driver Maintainer Changes In Recent Days
This week besides the drama over Apple Silicon maintainership for the upstream Linux kernel, in recent days there has also been a number of rather subtle changes to the maintainership of several Intel Linux kernel drivers...