Phoronix

NVIDIA is contributing a new open-source driver to the upstream Linux kernel for dealing with upcoming laptops where the backlight controls are handled by the device's embedded controller (EC)...

Fedora Workstation 35 will hopefully be out at the end of October (currently the beta is running behind schedule) and when it does ship it's once again at the bleeding-edge of Linux features. Fedora Workstation 35 is shaping up to be another great release for those interested in a feature-rich desktop experience...

For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, xf86-input-libinput 1.2 is now available for integrating the latest functionality of libinput input handling library...

Linux 5.15-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 5.15 in turn should be out as stable around the start of November...

HarfBuzz 3.0 has been released as a new version of this widely-used, open-source text shaping library that is used by the major Linux desktop environments along with Chrome OS, Java, Android, Chrome, and a plethora of other software projects and UI toolkits...

It was just a few weeks back that KSMBD was merged into Linux 5.15 while now it's seeing its first important security fix...

With a change to the nct6775 hardware monitoring sensor driver, more ASUS motherboards should enjoy working sensor support come Linux 5.16...

Jolla this week released Sailfish OS 4.2 "Verla" as the newest version of this Linux-based smartphone operating system that continues to be made commercially available for various devices...

The recently released SDL 2.0.16 brought much-improved Wayland support but it's still not quite good enough yet to have it be the default over the SDL X11 path. However, developers continue working in that direction to eventually use it by default...

One has to wonder how much longer the Linux kernel will keep around some very old and known to be borked hardware support but at least for now the DECpc AXP 150 "Jensen" platform support is sticking around and with Linux 5.15 is no longer marked as "broken" outright...

BayLibre developer Alexandre Bailon has posted a "request for comments" of a new open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for AI Processing Unit (APU) functionality. Initially the driver is catering to Mediatek SoCs with an AI co-processor but this DRM "APU" driver could be adapted to other hardware too...

The latest patches sent out for review/testing on the long mission for enabling Apple M1 support on Linux is the USB Type-C connectivity...

As reported at the start of August, AMD and Valve have been working on Linux CPU performance/frequency scaling improvements with the Steam Deck being one of the leading motivators. As speculated at that time, their work would likely revolve around use of ACPI CPPC found with Zen 2 CPUs and newer. Published last week was that AMD P-State driver for Linux systems indeed now leveraging CPPC information. AMD formally presented this new driver yesterday at XDC2021...

There's still some time to go before seeing the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release for this open-source image manipulation program but at least out this weekend is GIMP 2.10.28 for bettering the current stable series...

Along with releasing Plasma 5.23 Beta this week, KDE developers have been busy on driving in a bunch of Plasma Wayland fixes and other refinements to their stack...

One of the areas where Linux has struggled on the desktop has been around HDR (high dynamic range) display support while that will hopefully be addressed in the coming months with Red Hat hiring an engineer to focus on that problem...

Developers are hoping for next year's GCC 12 release they will have Apple AArch64 support on Darwin in place for being able to support Apple Silicon -- initially the M1 SoC -- on macOS with GCC...

Longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst who has worked extensively on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as well as the OpenCL/compute stack while being employed by Red Hat is now toying with the idea of Rust code inside Mesa...

The unplanned Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS release is available today that was made on short notice for addressing unbootable media with Ubuntu 18.04.5...

Along with bringing up DG2/Alchemist graphics card support on Linux, Intel engineers have been working to square away their support for the DG1 developer graphics card. This week thanks to XDC2021 is a fresh status update about what is working with this initial Intel graphics card on their open-source driver and what remains in the works...