3 impressive Linux apps to try this weekend (April 3 - 5)
Free, open-source, and better than the stuff you're probably paying for.
Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
Free, open-source, and better than the stuff you're probably paying for.
Your old PC might finally feel it due to a subtle shift in how computing has evolved.
These two launches ought to keep Big Tech on their toes.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will increase the minimum RAM requirement for Desktop users from 4 GB to 6 GB.
GNU GRUB 2, mostly just referred to as GRUB these days, is the most widely used boot loader for x86_64 Linux systems. It supports reading from a vast selection of filesystems, handles booting modern systems with UEFI or legacy systems with a BIOS, and even allows users to customize the "splash" image displayed when a system boots. Alas, all of those features come with a price; GRUB has had a parade of security vulnerabilities over the years. To mitigate some of those problems, Ubuntu core developer and Canonical employee Julian Andres Klode has proposed removing a number of features from GRUB in Ubuntu 26.10 to improve GRUB's security profile. His proposal has not been met with universal acclaim; many of the features Klode would like to remove have vocal proponents.
On April 1, the Gentoo Linux project published a blog post announcing that it was switching to GNU Hurd as its primary kernel as an April Fool's joke. While that is not true, the project has followed up with an announcement of a new Gentoo port to the Hurd: Our crack team has been working hard to port Gentoo to the Hurd and can now share that they've succeeded, though it remains still in a heavily experimental stage. You can try Gentoo GNU/Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image. The easiest way to do this is with QEMU [...] We have developed scripts to build this image locally and conveniently work on further development of the Hurd port. Release media like stages and automated image builds are future goals, as is feature parity on x86-64. Further contributions are welcome, encouraged, and needed. Be patient, expect to get your hands dirty, anticipate breakage, and have fun! Oh, and Gentoo GNU/Hurd also works on real hardware! Text for the April Fool's post is available at the bottom of
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, grafana, kernel, rsync, and thunderbird), Debian (chromium, inetutils, and libpng1.6), Fedora (bind9-next, nginx-mod-modsecurity, and openbao), Mageia (firefox, nss and thunderbird), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), SUSE (conftest, dnsdist, ignition, libsoup, libsoup2, LibVNCServer, libXvnc-devel, opensc, ovmf-202602, perl-Crypt-URandom, python-tornado, python311-ecdsa, python311-Pygments, python315, tar, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (cairo, jpeg-xl, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.17, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.17, linux-hwe-6.17, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, linux-raspi, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp-fips, and linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-raspi-realtime).
The Radxa X5 is the newest product in the ‘X’ series of Single Board Computers (SBC) by Radxa. This board is an upgrade from the ‘X4’ which had an Intel N100 CPU. With the newer CPU type, this board has better performance. Specifications The ‘X5’ has the following hardware specs: CPU Intel N150 4 Core GPU Intel Graphics - Alder Lake N Up to 1000 MHz Display 2x Micro HDMI Ports 4K at 60 Hz RAM... https://www.linux.org/threads/getting-started-with-the-radxa-x5-sbc-on-linux.64236/
Intel today released their Linux NPU Driver 1.32 as the user-space driver components that interacts with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for supporting the NPU hardware with Core Ultra processors...
Most of my Intel Panther Lake benchmarking over the past two months for the new Core Ultra Series 3 hardware has been done with Ubuntu Linux given the pervasiveness of it, especially in the corporate/enterprise space. But for those looking at achieving even greater out-of-the-box Linux performance on Intel Panther Lake, the Arch Linux based CachyOS does a pretty fine job at further advancing the performance.
Following an April Fools' Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available...
With Linux 6.19 AMD GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.1 dGPUs now default to the AMDGPU driver rather than the legacy Radeon Linux driver. For these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics cards it means much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improved functionality in using this modern AMDGPU kernel graphics driver on Linux. One of the exceptions has been the GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri still defaulting to the older Radeon driver but a patch has been volleyed to make that change...
Meta's great Linux engineering team have been working through some fresh performance optimizations recently from optimizing /proc/interrupts outputs to renewing their investment in jemalloc. A new Linux kernel patch this week provides another optimization to avoid a possible situation of throttling the TCP throughput unnecessarily on Linux systems...
Arch-based systemd-free Artix Linux 2026.04 is out with XLibre by default and PipeWire replacing PulseAudio in ISOs.
Developers working on the FreeBSD laptop initiative to make the FreeBSD operating system more suitable for running on modern laptop hardware have drafted their road-map of further action items they hope to accomplish in 2026...