Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

The latest upstream file-system to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel is... BFS.

Earlier this year ARCTIC published a fan controller driver for Linux. Besides being rare for an enthusiast-oriented company to publish a Linux driver themselves where typically it's left up to the open-source community for driver support for such peripherals, it was all the more interesting as they published the Linux driver and got it mainlined before the product was even released. In the end the ARTCIC Fan Controller is the best desktop fan controller for Linux and less than $10 USD. That open-source driver is now being dual-licensed to help with in bringing it to more operating systems.

It's been quite some time since hearing any news out of the Shotwell photo manager project for GNOME, but out today is Shotwell 33 with the long-awaited GTK4 port.

The EROFS read-only file-system popular for embedded systems, containers, and other use-cases has resorted to temporarily disabling its LZ4 rolling decompression support due to data corruption concerns.

For those wanting the freshest Debian 13 "Trixie" install media, Debian 13.7 is out today in bundling up all the latest bug and security fixes.

A Void Linux maintainer has orphaned more than 100 packages he maintained over a dispute of the project's AI policy for LLM-generated text.

Amid Intel cutting back on open-source projects over the past two years as cost cutting measures at the company, their latest open-source project on the chopping block was the peculiar font they developed a few years back. The project was archived this week only to change course two days later.

GTK 4.24 released on Friday as the newest stable feature release to the GTK4 toolkit. It's quite a nice update to GTK4 for pairing with next week's GNOME 51 desktop release.

Releasing on Friday was the Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.38 as the user-space open-source driver components for leveraging the Core Ultra Neural Processing Unit (NPU) under Linux in conjunction with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver.

A possible future enhancement being considered for Ubuntu Long Term Support "LTS" releases is the introduction of a linux-firmware-hwe package as part of their hardware enablement (HWE) stack.

Along with KDE Plasma 6.8 beta releasing this week, there were some other interesting Plasma changes this week worthy of a shout-out.

For those in pursuit of a graphical Git client for GNOME or the Linux desktop at large, the GTK4-powered Gitte continues advancing rather well and out this week is its v0.10 release.

Since being merged back during the Linux 7.2 cycle, the Cache Aware Scheduling code continues seeing more fixes as users test out this scheduling enhancement on different processors and system configurations.

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe continues to uncover new opportunities for making the wonderful IO_uring framework even more performant within the Linux kernel. For ending out the week he's posted some "crazy" patches delivering some significant gains.

The Mold high performance linker that typically outperforms the likes of LLVM lld, GNU LD, Wild, and others is being rewritten in the Rust programming language and also has an ambitious goal of being adopted as the default linker on Linux systems.

Erik Faye-Lund who has contributed to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack working on areas like Zink and most notably the PanVK Vulkan and Panfrost Gallium3D drivers forr Arm Mali hardware is now working directly for Arm.

The Linux Mint project today published their August 2026 development report, including some new applications added to their XApp collection.

Linux 7.4 is now set to reach the elusive milestone of HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. After the HDMI Forum previously rejected HDMI 2.1 for the AMDGPU open-source driver implementation going back years, earlier this year something changed -- widely speculated to be with Valve's involvement -- that HDMI 2.1 patches began appearing for the AMDGPU driver. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle, the bulk of that work will now be in place and enabled by default.

While still ultimately working toward Git 3.0 with SHA-256 hashes by default and the "main" branch name by default, among other breaking changes (and potentially coming around the end of 2026), Git 2.56-rc0 is now available for testing.

Intel's Thermald released on Thursday as the newest update to this daemon for thermal monitoring on Intel hardware that was also recently extended for beginning to support Qualcomm/ARM hardware too. The main change with Thermald 2.5.13 is adding back Intel Wildcat Lake platform support after it was accidentally removed in the prior release.

For those continuing to rely on the GCC 13 compiler in production that debuted more than three years ago, GCC 13.5 released today with more than 265 bug fixes. GCC 13.5 also caps off the GCC 13 series as the last planned point release.

In addition to August bringing the long-awaited Haiku R1 Beta 6 release, there was also a lot of development progress on this BeOS-inspired operating system too during the course of the past month.

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release for transitioning from GTK2 to GTK3 only saw its stable release last year. But with GTK4 already being out for years, GIMP developers have begun making some very early preparations toward an inevitable GTK4 port.

Coming with Linux 7.3 is DRM format modifiers for GFX6 through GFX8 era GPUs covering the original Raddeon HD 7000 (GCN 1.0) graphics cards up through the Polaris and Fiji series. This work by Valve's Timur Kristóf is necessary for these older GPUs to support Vulkan-based Wayland compositors, better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan or other APis, compositors running on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, and other benefits. Now merged for Mesa 26.3 is the RadeonSI and RADV user-space side support for making use of the format modifiers on these older GPUs.

For those continuing to make use of the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support "LTS" series, Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS is out today as the newest point release.

Ahead of the stable release of Plasma 6.8 due out on 14 October that also marks the 30th anniversary of the KDE project, out today is the much anticipated beta release.

Last month I covered Intel posting a new driver named "BFF" for the Linux kernel. This BFF driver is for a new hardware feature debuting with next-gen Diamond Rapids processors for better dealing with aging CPU silicon where some bits may become stuck over time.

Merged today for next quarter's Mesa 26.3 release is an improvement for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver. This latest NVK improvement benefits usage of Valve's Gamescope micro-compositor and should help with performance during game recording and remote play.

We're getting closer to the X.Org Server 26.1 stable release as the first new tagged feature release since X.Org Server 21.1 debuted back in October 2021. There have been some new features, many code reverts, and many bug fixes merged over the past five years that will culminate with the X.Org Server 26.1 stable release.

As a last minute change ahead of next week's GNOME 51 desktop release, changes to Mutter and gsettings-desktop-schemas have now landed for supporting custom pointer acceleration profiles.

Released overnight was the newest version of the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment developed by System76 as part of the effort on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

For those continuing to use GNU Automake over the likes of Meson or CMake for your build system, Automake 1.19 is out today as the first new release in 15 months. Among the many fixes in this release is for a bug dating back 14 years.

Tonight Valve released a big Steam client beta update with a number of new features and fixes.

A ReactOS developer for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and applications has achieved an intriguing software stack. With the experimental ReactOS ARM64 build for running on 64-bit ARM hardware like Raspberry Pi SBCs, he's paired that "open-source Windows" OS with the open-source FEX emulator for in turn being able to run Windows x64 games/apps on ReactOS atop native ARM hardware.

Following last month's initial release candidate of XWayland 26.1 with its many new features, a second release candidate is now available with a number of fixes.

System76 today unveiled their newest desktop computer as the Thelio Mira AI. The System76 Thelio Mira AI is designed for multi-GPU AI training, model fine-tuning, AI inferencing, computer vision and image generation tasks on tthe AI side. Or with its AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPU and NVIDIA/AMD GPU options is also a good candidate for simulations and other HPC-type workloads.

The first alpha release of the upcoming OpenSSL 4.1 release is now available for testing with some GREASE and DTLS 1.3 support along with more AVX-512 performance optimizations.

NVIDIA today debuted the 615.71.09 Linux driver that comes with a number of improvements, especially from the Vulkan API perspective.

In addition to the still-pending kernel work for improving the in-kernel Zstd code, sepaarately the Btrfs file-system driver has an improvement on the way in its decompression code path for the Zstd transparent file-system compression.

It's nice seeing a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch out of AMD today that is a general optimization for the x86_64 compiler code and not exclusively tied to their Zen processors. It's an Extended Load Optimization to benefit code where there is a narrower type and then an arithmetic type with a wider type.

Red Hat's David Airlie has managed another open-source graphics engineering feat... Getting the Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel graphics driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver running on the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip with the DGX Spark system.

Announced a few months back was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in the Rust programming language. In getting the project off the ground quickly and given the size of X11, it was largely vibe coded with Claude Code. The project continues and is attracting contributions from more users with today marking the YSERVER 1.5 release.

An ARM Linux engineer leveraged AI/LLMs to help uncover some improvements to "significant speed up" the Linux kernel build times. In the process the LLM used generated "a lot of code, much of it hideous" but in the end was used to find some very significant time savings for faster kernel builds via more task parallelization in different areas of the kernel build process.

One week after releasing systemd 262-rc1, systemd 262-rc2 is now available with further fixes and refinements for this init system and service manager. Systemd is also the latest open-source project introducing an AI canary for aiming to detect AI/LLM-based code contributors that weren't reviewed by an actual person in advance of the pull request.

An interesting new open-source project for those looking to make use of NVIDIA DLSS 5 on Linux is DLSS5VKLayer. The DLSS5VKLayer is a Linux Vulkan layer that works for both native Linux games as well as Steam Play (Proton) Windows games for experimental DLSS 5 support.

Merged today to the latest KDE KWin compositor development code is support for Wayland's important commit-timing protocol that is useful for video playback as well as for gamers relying on Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync support.

For the current Linux 7.3 kernel many older 32-bit ARM platforms are deprecated and in turn orphaning hundreds of drivers only relevant to those out-of-date ARM platforms. The removal of that now deprecated code is planned for the next kernel cycle or two.

For those using the Linux-friendly DaVinci Resolve video editing and color correction/grading and visual effects software, DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is out today as a major update to this cross-platform solution.

It turns out one of the feature limitations of the AMDGPU Linux graphics driver is HDMI 1.4 3D output support with frame packing, top-and-bottom, and side-by-side options for transmitting simultaneous video streams. I wasn't aware of this limitation for the lack of any 3D displays and many Linux enthusiasts/gamers as well, but if you happen to have a compatible HDMI 1.4 3D display, there are pending patches to finally make this a reality.

Queued this past week into the net-next development tree of the latest networking additions for the Linux kernel is enabling support for Realtek's newer RTL8127atf and RTL8116af wired networking ASICs.

Over the past four years there has been a lot of work on a DirectX back-end within the LLVM compiler stack. Microsoft has backed the initiative for being able to lower LLVM IR into the DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) for execution by Windows DirectX 12 graphics drivers. This back-end is now officially supported.

FEX 2609 was released overnight as the newest monthly feature release for this open-source emulator that allows running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, including the likes of Steam and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling Windows games to run rather well on ARM64 Linux systems.

With the Linux kernel still working toward landing support for AMD's RMPOPT optimization for helping to reduce overhead on SEV-SNP enabled servers, the LLVM/Clang compiler has in turn prepped for the milestone by landing support for the RMPOPT, RMPREAD, and RMPCHKD instructions for Zen 5 and newer.