Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Canonical engineers back in 2023 outlined plans for Ubuntu Core Desktop as their immutable Linux desktop. They made some good initial progress but since 2024 it went rather silent. Now they are reviving Ubuntu Core Desktop as their immutable desktop OS offering and with grand plans for the future.

NetBSD-current has added a new command line text editor to its base set of packages for helping out new users as an alternative to their vi and xedit editors currently included.

Open-source developer Jamey Sharp who is a longtime X.Org developer and co-creator of the X protocol C-language Binding (XCB) finally had the need to write a Wayland client and ended up praising its design.

While the Linux kernel and various file-system drivers already support the notion of the birth time for tracking a file/directory's birth/creation time, a slightly different provenance time "ptime" is now being proposed for the Linux kernel.

For those that want to reminisce over the days long ago of Compiz and Beryl on the Linux desktop, the Hyprland 0.57 Wayland compositor released today and has added Compiz-inspired wobbly windows support.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team just tagged the VKD3D-Proton 3.1 release. This version comes with a number of new features and performance optimizations while being the stable point ahead of VKD3D-Proton beginning to see a lot of new feature code for what will then become VKD3D-Proton 3.2.

GhostBSD 26.2 is out as the latest feature release of this FreeBSD-powered desktop operating system.

Paragon Software's Konstantin Komarov sent out the latest NTFS3 driver updates for this in-kernel NTFS read/write driver. With Linux 7.4, the NTFS3 driver is focused on being hardened against corrupted or maliciously-crafted NTFS volumes.

A patch has been proposed to remove the BSD-Compress support from the Linux kernel for the Linux networking point-to-point protocol (PPP) due to being unmaintained and having fundamental issues with the code that can lead to a fatal error.

An initiative led by CodeWeavers this year has come to fruition for improving OpenGL support with WoW64 for bettering Windows 32-bit application/game support while using 64-bit system libraries.

Merged today for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window is the infrastructure for enabling DMA-BUF support in the kernel's I/O path with the wonderful IO_uring framework.

It looks like a next-generation Raspberry Pi Zero is about to surface, the long-awaited Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W. And in an interesting twist in these times amid high PC component costs and supply chain constraints, a Raspberry Pi 4 Model A.

A long-standing KDE bug is set to be resolved with next month's KDE Frameworks 6.32 release.

Back in September Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux and Serpent OS notoriety as well as being a former Intel Clear Linux developer announced Barney as his planned showcase for how to "properly" build a modern Linux distribution in 2026+. Today he's provided an update on this Barney distro tooling effort as well as announcing Pavee OS as his planned daily-driver desktop distribution built atop it.

Debuting two weeks ago on the 30th anniversary of the KDE project was the Plasma 6.8 desktop with many exciting improvements. Last week it was succeeded by Plasma 6.8.1 with dozens of bug fixes and this week now brings Plasma 6.8.2 with yet more bug fixing.

The many Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements have been merged for Linux 7.4 to deliver a number of new features for different server processors.

An interesting new open-source project born out of university research is Beeper to provide application-layer parsing within the in-kernel eBPF. With an HTTP parser implemented by Beeper in eBPF and providing an in-kernel HTTP cache, the throughput for web servers could be improved by 3x at high rates.

Merged back in Linux 7.1 was the new NTFS kernel driver implementation for better supporting Microsoft's NTFS file-system on Linux. Since then new features and improvements have continued to land for this NTFS driver with some more notable additions also coming in Linux 7.4.

With the Linux 7.4 kernel there are more MSI and ASUS motherboards with sensor monitoring support along with a variety of other additions to help broaden the selection of supported systems for hardware sensor monitoring under Linux. It's another busy cycle for the HWMON subsystem.

Firefox 159 is out today as the latest bi-weekly feature release for Mozilla's web browser.

The many SoC patches have landed within the Linux 7.4 kernel providing support for dozens of new boards as well as a number of new SoCs like the Apple M4 and the A18 Pro as found in the MacBook Neo. The Google Tensor 5 was also finally mainlined along with Pixel 10 devices. Plus some unreleased Qualcomm SoC support rounds out the bunch.

The mainline Linux 7.4 kernel will be capable of running on the Steam Frame VR headset.

The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem changes were merged today for the Linux 7.4 kernel. The fun work this cycle is preparing to support Dynamic Capacity Devices.

KMSCON as the user-space terminal emulator targeting Linux DRM/KMS interfaces as an alternative to the in-kernel VT now is able to individually configure monitors in multi-monitor setups. Plus a variety of other improvements with today's KMSCON 10.1 release.

The media subsystem changes have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel. Most notable is Intel IPU8 support being introduced for the next-gen image processing unit in high-end Nova Lake laptops

Open-source developer Jason Donenfeld known for his work on WireGuard announced today the release of kwin-type. KWin-type is a new Wayland-compatible program for auto-typing text from the standard input under the KWin Wayland compositor.

In development for a number of months now has been Kraid as a modern graphics compiler for recent Arm Mali GPUs. Kraid was merged for Mesa 26.2 back in June while in Mesa 27.0 due out in Q1 it will be switching to this new shader compiler by default.

The EFI updates have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel and include an improvement for when the system was booted directly into the kernel on EFI-based systems without using a bootloader like GRUB or systemd-boot.

Nouveau-DKMS is in development as an out-of-tree spin-off of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver focused on providing better support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" series graphics processors and potentially other generations too pre-Turing where the modern Nova driver is in development by NVIDIA.

Core memory management patches to the Linux kernel have typically been routed to mainline via Andrew Morton's "MM" branch, which is where also a variety of broader memory management related patches are also queued like all the ongoing work to DAMON/DAMOS. Kernel maintainers have now agreed to a new "Core MM" tree as the home for all of the core memory management changes moving forward.

Merged for Linux 7.4 Git and marked for back-porting to Linux 7.2/7.3 stable is a regression fix affecting at least the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" laptop SoC when making use of Cache Aware Scheduling.

Open-source developer Mark Harmstone who is known for his work on developing a Btrfs file-system driver for Windows has spent the past few years working on a new hobby operating system. Moxnox is an NT-like, POSIX-compatible operating system.

The EXT4 file-system changes were merged Sunday night for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window. The headline feature of EXT4 in this new kernel version is opt-in support for buffered IOmap usage that can lead to "significant" performance improvements for large writes.

The Rust-based open-source operating system Redox OS had a very eventful September as they outlined in a status update published this weekend.

Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser sent out a merge request today for introducing the new ext-transient-output protocol. With ext-transient-output, it's intent is for helping remoting software like VNC servers in a Wayland world.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE began the Linux 7.4 sound pull request by noting that "the AI flood continues" with there continuing to be a lot of new patches coming as a result of AI/LLM agents devising patches as well as uncovering new kernel bugs.

Following all the HID driver updates/additions in Linux 7.4, the input subsystem changes were merged this weekend for this new kernel version.

Back in May the AV2 v1.0 specification was released for this next-generaton, royalty-free video codec. This week the Alliance For Open Media issued a press release talking up the early adoption of AV2.

After nearly a decade in the Linux kernel's staging area and being worked on by many different kernel developer newcomers, the Realtek rtl8723bs was deleted from the staging area. This comes as Realtek rtl8723bs was added onto the more mature RTW88 driver in the Linux networking subsystem.

With the Linux 7.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to the v7.2 and v7.3 series is finally the ability to monitor temperature sensors on AMD 600 Series chipsets that launched alongside the Ryzen 7000 series processors.

Linus Torvalds merged the "char/misc" changes for the Linux 7.4 kernel driver on Saturday. Most notable this cycle for char/misc is what's being removed: Google's C-written Binder driver has left the kernel with the Rust-based modern Binder driver ready to take for the role of being used by all future Android devices.

The Linux 7.4 block/storage and IO_uring updates were merged today for the ongoing merge window. With the breadth of Linux hardware support, the pull request varies from fixes to Linux's floppy driver to enabling support for NVMe storage on Apple M4 devices.

On Friday Valve released SteamOS 3.9.5 as their first stable release in the SteamOS 3.9 series. This brings all the great improvements previously available in preview form with many package updates and other enhancements.

Sent out today for the Linux 7.4 kernel were a set of memblock improvements. Most notable is a performance optimization within mm/memblock.c that implements the kernel's early boot-time physical memory allocator that is used prior to the bring-up of the full page allocator.

As of today in systemd Git it's now possible for the systemd programs to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C.

Andrew Morton sent out the big set of memory management "MM" related patches for the Linux 7.4 merge window. This cycle it topped out at 539 total patches and a reviewed rate of 76%.

Wild 0.11 is out as the latest feature release of this very fast linker currently targeting Linux systems and focused on iterative development.

Merged overnight were all the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates consisting of many kernel graphics/display driver improvements. Arguably most exciting with these updates for Linux 7.4 is the AMD Radeon (AMDGPU) driver seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL enabled by default along with other HDMI 2.1 features.

With the wonderful KDE Plasma 6.8 having shipped just more than one week ago, KDE developers are beginning to go heavy on new features for Plasma 6.9.

OBS Studio 33.0 is out tonight as the latest major update to this popular open-source and cross-platform video recording and live streaming application.

The slab pull request was just merged for Linux 7.4. For end users nothing too incredibly exciting but there is one change that does yield a 24% throughput improvement in a benchmark exercising the kernel's memory management subsystem.

HPFS is the latest file-system driver for the Linux kernel facing possible removal. The High Performance File-System (HPFS) was developed by IBM and Microsoft for OS/2.

Seeing a Vulkan API driver pull request this morning for introducing a new "Borealis" driver ID caught me by surprise as it was the first time I was hearing of such a driver. It turns out to be a fork of the Asahi Linux project's HoneyKrisp driver in Mesa for Apple Silicon hardware.

The UXL Foundation announced today the release of oneDNN 3.14 as the latest feature update to this library providing optimized deep learning operations for software like PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenVINO, and others. While oneDNN began as an Intel software project, making this version notable is beginning to see AMD Zen CPU optimizations land in oneDNN proper.

The power management subsystem updates were merged this week for Linux 7.4 along with the related ACPI and thermal control updates too.

OpenSSL 4.1 stable is out today with new AVX-512 optimizations, other performance improvements, and finally retiring Windows on Itanium and Windows CE support.

The PCI/PCIe subsystem improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.366 is out and representing the past two weeks of specification fixes, clarifications, and one new Vulkan API extension.

The release dance is underway for FFmpeg 9.1 as the newest feature release for this widely-used open-source multimedia library.

The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel that included a few new drivers.

LibreSSL 4.4 released on Thursday as the newest release of this decade-old OpenSSL fork maintained by OpenBSD developers.

As a follow-up to the article in September about a Linux patch for fixing under-reported AMD Zen 5 TLB sizes, that work is now merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel.