Open-source News

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6's performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.

KDE Plasma 6.6 Showing Frequent Performance Advantage Over GNOME 50 With NVIDIA R595 Driver  Phoronix

One UI 8.5 brings major Linux Terminal upgrades to Galaxy devices  SamMobile

Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM...

Intel Xe Driver Improves Memory Pressure / Out-Of-Memory Behavior For vRAM With Linux 7.1  Phoronix

I stopped using Snap — Flatpak just works better  MakeUseOf

Samsung’s One UI 8.5 Update Supercharges the Built-in Linux Terminal  androidheadlines.com

Planetary Annihilation: TITANS gets revived as the devs ask for Linux help and feedback  GamingOnLinux

With sched_ext there is support for BPF-based CPU scheduling policies for the Linux kernel while now a new initiative is working on BPF-based I/O schedulers...

Even if you have 16GB of RAM, this one "compressed swap" trick makes Linux significantly smoother  How-To Geek

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS beta sports GNOME 50 and the Linux kernel 7.0  Notebookcheck

In addition to this week's ROCm 7.2.1 stable point release, ROCm 7.12 was also released as the newest tech preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0...

An important set of Linux scheduler patches were posted for review on Thursday for improving the SMT-aware asymmetric CPU capacity handling. These patches to improve the Linux kernel scheduler around CPU Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is needed after NVIDIA engineers discovered up to a ~2x performance drop for CPU-intensive workloads on their upcoming Vera Rubin platform...

Linux Patches Posted To Fix ~2x Performance Drop For CPU Workloads On NVIDIA Vera Rubin  Phoronix

Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements were sent out this week as feature development for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 7.1 begins to wind down...

Red Hat Warns of Malware Code Embedded in Popular Linux Tool Allow Unauthorized Access to Systems  CyberSecurityNews

Red Hat Warns of Malware Embedded in Popular Linux Tool Allowing Unauthorized Access  cyberpress.org

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Beta released with GNOME 50, Linux kernel 7.0, Mesa 26  GamingOnLinux

Samsung One UI 8.5 unlocks ‘desktop-like’ power with Linux GUI apps  Sammy Fans

This non-Chromium Linux browser can run Chrome, Firefox, and Safari extensions  XDA