Open-source News

One of the many interesting Linux kernel innovations I have closely been following this year has been the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling support. I have shown the Cache Aware Scheduling performance on AMD EPYC as well as the Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids performance, but what about desktops? In this article is a quick look at Cache Aware Scheduling with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D...

Linux's Cache Aware Scheduling On AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D 3D V-Cache  Phoronix

Open-source developer Derek J. Clark continues leading the efforts on improving the Lenovo Legion Go series hardware support under Linux. Posted today was the second iteration of the HID driver work for the Legion Go and Legion Go S for configuration support with the built-in controller HID interfaces...

Updated Linux Drivers Posted For Legion Go & Legion Go S Configuration  Phoronix

The 5 best macOS-like Linux desktop environments for a polished, modern look  How-To Geek

The next Linux kernel cycle, which will be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely Linux 7.0, is expected to land some IO_uring improvements for better IOPOLL polling...

Linux 7.0 Expected To Bring IO_uring IOPOLL Polling Improvements  Phoronix

Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of SuperTux as the open-source jump-n-run game that used to be included on some early Linux live CD/DVDs for this Super Mario Bros inspired game. There hasn't been a new release of SuperTux in over four years but out today is the beta of SuperTux 0.7 as a major overhaul to the free software, family-friendly game title...

SuperTux 0.7 Reaches Beta For Reviving An Open-Source Classic  Phoronix

If You Have an Older NVIDIA GPU on Arch Linux, Your System Might Be Broken  It's FOSS

New Linux 6.19-rc3 kernel candidate adds CPU idle detection for POWER11  Neowin

In addition to today's blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition "nears completion" as it works to become Wayland-only in early 2027...

I've tried nearly every browser out there and these are my top 4 (spoiler: none are Chrome)  ZDNET

What exactly makes Linux so bulletproof?  How-To Geek

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.19-rc3 to ship this week's fixes. Linux 6.19-rc3 is coming in light as expected due to the Christmas week with many corporate developers getting paid time off and others taking part in year-end festivities...

Linux 6.19-rc3 Released With A Holiday's Week Of Fixes  Phoronix

Between the DXVK and VKD3D(-Proton) projects there is good support for Direct3D 8 through Direct3D 12 implementations atop the Vulkan API for Linux gaming usage. For those preferring more retro classic gaming, D7VK came about more recently for Direct3D 7 as a DXVK fork. Out today is D7VK 1.1 and besides delivering fixes for its D3D7 implementation has also now tacked on an experimental D3D6 front-end...

4 interesting Linux distributions that first appeared in 2025  How-To Geek

6 reasons 2026 could finally be the year of desktop Linux—for real this time  How-To Geek

Similar to AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs where there was product overlap between the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers (and now using AMDGPU by default for those aging Radeon GPUs with Linux 6.19), the Intel Arc A-Series "Alchenist" graphics cards are in a similar boat. By default the Alchemist and Meteor Lake graphics use the i915 kernel driver by default but they can optionally use the Xe kernel driver instead as what is Intel's modern open-source kernel graphics driver. As part of our various year end 2025 benchmarks, today is a look at the current i915 vs. Xe driver performance for the Intel Arc Graphics A580.