Open-source News

Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen "50xx" NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository...

Intel NPU Firmware Published For Panther Lake - Completing The Linux Driver Support  Phoronix

Legacy AMD GPUs receive 30% performance boost in Linux with new drivers — latest kernel update finally drops obsolete Radeon graphics driver after more than two decades  Tom's Hardware

Void Phone VX1 is Linux phone with enterprise management features  Liliputing

7 ways to create an empty file in Linux (and what each one teaches you)  Yahoo! Tech

Facebook deploys the Steam Deck's Linux scheduler across its data centers — Valve's low-latency scheduler perfect for managing Meta's workloads at massive data centers  Tom's Hardware

Linux phones are getting even better with postmarketOS 25.12  How-To Geek

Surfshark expands dedicated IP to Linux in its latest desktop update  TechRadar

Here's Our Prediction for the Future of Desktop Linux in 2026  It's FOSS

AMD Krackan Point Sub-$500 Laptop Linux Performance Improves By ~8% In Just Six Months  Phoronix

As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it's typically done on the higher-end hardware. That's done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 "Krackan Point" CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.

I tested the new elementaryOS 8.1 beta, and it absolutely brings the magic  ZDNET

postmarketOS 25.12 Linux Mobile OS Rolls Out Based on Alpine Linux 3.23  9to5Linux

Linux 6.19 Improves Radeon HD 7950’s Performance By 30% With AMDGPU Driver  Wccftech

Linux gaming is finally great, and these 4 distros are leading the way  MakeUseOf

Elementary OS 8.1 arrives with Linux 6.14 kernel and smoother multitasking  Neowin

Surfshark is one of the few to add dedicated IP to the Linux GUI app  The Manila Times

The open-source Mesa PowerVR "PVR" Vulkan driver has merged multi-architecture support as part of preparing to add support for newer Imagination GPUs...

Here's our 2025 GOTY picks  GamingOnLinux

Last week a request for comments (RFC) was issued around establishing an LLVM AI Tool Use Policy. The proposed policy would allow AI-assisted contributions to be made to this open-source compiler codebase but that there would need to be a "human in the loop" and the contributor versed enough to be able to answer questions during code review. Separately, yesterday a proposal was sent out for creating an AI-assisted fixer bot to help with Bazel build system breakage...