Phoronix

GIMP 2.99.2 is finally available as their "first step" towards releasing GIMP 3.0 that most notably transitions from the GTK2 to GTK3 toolkit...

VKD3D-Proton as the Valve-backed fork of Wine's VKD3D for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan is now supporting more features with today's v2.0 release and thus handling more Windows games running on Linux with Steam Play...

Back in August we reported on Red Hat engineers developing Stalld as a new Linux service for detecting stalled threads and also allowing select threads to be boosted based on policy. In the months since Stalld continues to be developed and recently saw new releases...

FlightGear 2020.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this long-standing, open-source flight simulator software package...

It's not across the finish line at least yet but Mesa 20.3 just merged today the initial prep changes needed for exposing OpenCL 3.0 support within the Clover Gallium3D state tracker...

For the past several months there have been a number of Intel Linux DRM patch series around "big joiner" support and that is looking like it may soon be finished up for allowing support for driving 8K displays off a single port...

An initial round of predominantly AMDGPU kernel driver patches have been called upon for pulling into DRM-Next as new feature work for Linux 5.11...

Following the news that we were first to report last month on Intel starting open-source public patches for Vulkan ray-tracing in preparation for their forthcoming Xe HPG graphics card, the initial prep work for that Vulkan ray-tracing support has now been merged in time for Mesa 20.3...

While the Sony PlayStation 5 isn't beginning to ship until next week there is now support within the widely-used SDL2 library for its controllers...

Not only are AMD Ryzen 5000 series completely dominating in performance but they could soon see open-source Coreboot support as an alternative to the proprietary firmware/BIOS. Project X is an interesting effort around blob-free Coreboot/Oreboot support on AMD Zen...

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X are hands-down incredible winners. While processor company marketing claims are sometimes dubious and not necessarily relevant to Linux users and their open-source workloads/software, after testing the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X the past several weeks the performance has been incredibly compelling with significant single and multi-threaded performance uplift over Zen 2 and easily thrashing Intel's current desktop offerings with over 200 benchmarks conducted for launch-day.

After just publishing the results of 200+ Linux benchmarks under many diverse workloads for the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X we see the 16~20% performance lift is very real and very broad from obscure open-source niche software through high profile programs... What about the Linux gaming performance? This article offers a first look at the Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux gaming performance compared to Zen 2 and the Core i9 10900K while being the first of several Linux gaming performance articles coming out this month.

For those fond of the Sega Saturn video game console controllers from the mid-90s, the Linux 5.11 kernel has a fix so a common USB adapter for them will behave nicely...

The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer...

It was just a few days ago that AMD engineers released AMDVLK 2020.Q4.2 as their newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver snapshot while that has already been succeeded by version 2020.Q4.3...

Upstream Linux kernel developers are looking at changing some of their Spectre mitigation defaults around what's applied to SECCOMP threads by default in part due to the performance hit as well as other reasons...

Fedora 33 was just released at the end of October but already a number of change proposals are building up for Fedora 34 due out next spring...

While the Linux 5.10 merge window passed a week and a half ago, similar to the Navi Blockchain SKU being added as a "fix", the Green Sardine enablement is also being submitted as a fix for this current kernel version...

In addition to Mesa 20.3 seeing RadeonSI support for EGL protected surfaces backed by the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver with Trusted Memory Zone support, AMD's graphics driver developers have now added support for secure/protected video acceleration playback to their Mesa driver code...

If the recent releases of KDE Plasma 5.20 and GNOME 3.38 didn't fulfill your wishes for a dream Linux desktop and are looking for something lightweight, LXQt 0.16 is out today...