Phoronix

Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation...

With the start of the new month comes updated Steam Survey figures for the month prior...

The beta of Ubuntu as well as its various flavors/derivatives is out ahead of the official "Hirsute Hippo" launch later this month...

To kick off a new month of Linux gaming, Valve today released Proton 6.3-1 as the latest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver now supports the Vulkan EXT_conservative_rasterization extension that is most notably used by DXVK for translating Direct3D atop this graphics API and work is also pending too for VKD3D...

Intel's open-source developers have released a new version of IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their open-source Linux compute stack, recently was transitioned for use by their Windows driver too, and might eventually be piped into their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

In the past few weeks since the introduction of the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors there has finally been AMD Zen 3 "Znver3" tuning work that's been hurried into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its stable release in the coming weeks. That initial Zen 3 tuning work has also now been back-ported to the GCC 10 branch ahead of its next point release...

The past several weeks have seen a few rounds of Intel graphics driver changes sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle. This Linux 5.13 Intel graphics driver work has included Alder Lake S enablement and other feature changes. A final batch of "feature" work was sent out this morning for targeting the Intel kernel graphics driver in Linux 5.13...

LLVM 12.0 was supposed to be out around the end of February but blocker bugs have resulted in additional release candidates as the developers work to button up this open-source compiler stack release...

There was a lot to get excited about over the course of the past month when it comes to our open-source and Linux area of focus...

While Fedora 34 isn't releasing until the end of April or so, there is already feature planning that has continued for Fedora 35 that will come in the autumn...

Oracle continues advancing their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" as the company's modified Linux kernel build offered to Oracle Linux users as an alternative to its Red Hat Compatible Kernel for their RHEL-based OS. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 Update 2 is out to end Q1'2021 with various new features...

GIMP 3.0 still isn't out yet but the GIMP 2.10 stable series continues seeing new point releases with additional feature work until that GTK3 version of this image editor / Photoshop alternative is ready...

Following last week's release of the Fedora 34 beta I've begun trying out this latest Fedora Linux build on a variety of test systems. Here are some preliminary figures of Fedora 34 against Fedora 33 stock and updated configurations when running on an AMD Ryzen 5000 series system with Radeon graphics.

Red Hat is ending out the quarter by issuing their first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4...

Canonical today announced the release of the "Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview" as a specialized build of Ubuntu catering to Microsoft's WSL2...

At the start of the year CloudLinux announced AlmaLinux as a 1:1 fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In ending out Q1, as promised this CentOS alternative is now available for download...

While Qt 6.1 is aiming to release around the end of April, for now the Qt 6.0 series continues marching forward and is out today with the Qt 6.0.3 point release providing another few dozen bug fixes...

Along with our Intel Core i5 11600K + Core i9 11900K Linux review from yesterday with 22 pages of benchmarks, even more performance data is now published and continues to flow in via OpenBenchmarking.org for looking at the Intel Rocket Lake performance across hundreds of benchmarks and compared to many other processors we have tested and that of the community...

GNOME 41 this autumn will be shipping with libadwaita, the successor and GTK4 port to GNOME's libhandy that will help to define the visual language and user experience for GNOME applications...