Linux NewsNew Rust Tool Traur Analyzes Arch AUR Packages for Hidden Risks
Traur is a new tool written in Rust that checks Arch AUR packages for hidden security risks before you install them.
Intel Recently Shelved Numerous Open-Source Projects
After discovering this morning that Intel archived/discontinued its On Demand "SDSi" GitHub project around that controversial feature, it was a slippery slope in noticing Intel recently archived around two dozen other open-source projects they previously maintained...
From Fallout to Retro: How to give your Linux bootloader a total makeover
Customizing the bootloader is much easier than you might think. You can download and install community themes with one-line commands.
In the Age of AI Writing Tools, I Picked Emacs for My Sci-Fi Novel
The venerable text editor feels timeless and timely in the age of AI and enshittification. A novelist argues that it is perhaps because Emacs is the embodiment of FOSS ideals
The Linux lsusb command has 5 secret uses you should know
Did you know you can check the maximum speed of a USB port with one command?
D7VK 1.3 Brings Support For Direct3D 5 On Vulkan
D7VK is a fork of the DXVK project that is an important part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 support atop Vulkan. With D7VK the original goal was a Direct3D 7 implementation on Vulkan. D7VK 1.1 brought experimental Direct3D 6 support and now with today's release of D7VK 1.3 is support for Direct3D 5...
A Lot Of Exciting Changes To Look Forward To With Linux 6.20 -- Or Linux 7.0
With Linux 6.19 due for release later today it then opens up the next kernel merge window. It could be Linux 6.20 but more than likely the next kernel version will be called Linux 7.0 with Linus Torvalds' past tradition of bumping the major version number after X.19. Whatever it ends up being called, here is a look at various "-next" changes that have been queuing up ahead of the merge window...
Intel Appears To Have Quietly Sunset "On Demand" Software Defined Silicon
Back in 2021 on Phoronix was first to report on Intel preparing Linux patches for a "Software Defined Silicon" feature for activating extra licensed hardware features. That Software Defined Silicon support continued moving forward and was then announced as Intel On Demand with a focus on users being able to pay to activate additional accelerators found on select SKUs but not enabled by default...
Wine-Staging 11.2 Brings More Patches To Help Adobe Photoshop On Linux
Building off Friday's release of Wine 11.2 is now Wine-Staging 11.2 as this experimental/testing version of Wine with hundreds of extra patches that have yet to be introduced in upstream proper for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications on Linux. Notable in this bi-weekly update are more patches for continuing to improve the Adobe Photoshop installer support on Linux...
Intel Releases QATlib 26.02 With New APIs For Zero-Copy DMA
Of Intel's different CPU accelerator IPs, the arguably most useful and with the greatest customer interest remains around QuickAssist Technology (QAT). Intel QAT allows offloading various compression and encryption tasks for better performance. Intel this week released QATlib 26.02 as the newest version of their user-space library for leveraging QuickAssist Technology on capable hardware...
DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay 2.40 Introduces New GUI, Light Path Visualizer
Back in 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced they were open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer and was then published in early 2023 for this renderer that has been used in a variety of featured animated films. Since then they have continued advancing this MoonRay code via the open-source OpenMoonRay project and this week published their newest feature update...
Microsoft On QEMU 10.2's New MSHV Accelerator For Hyper-V Guests
With QEMU 10.2 that released at the end of last year is the new "MSHV" accelerator for allowing VMs to be created from a Microsoft Hyper-V guest without using nested virtualization. Last weekend at FOSDEM 2026 was a presentation on this MSHV accelerator for those interested...
Setting Up Open Media Vault as a Home NAS
Open Media Vault is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server based on Debian Linux. With this integrated Operating System (OS), you can share media to any other device on the network. This is not a hardware solution, but a software solution that you can run on a system and share attached media, whether internal or external storage devices. Sharing Methods You can share storage devices on the network using multiple types of sharing methods: Network File System (NFS)... https://www.linux.org/threads/setting-up-open-media-vault-as-a-home-nas.59023/
Linux 6.19: 40% Speed Boost on Old AMD GPUs & Faster Ext4
Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.19, switching decades-old AMD graphics cards to the modern amdgpu driver and adding support for larger block sizes to ext4 among the changes. The AMD driver switch brings native Vulkan support to Radeon R9 290 and HD 7000 series GPUs, while the ext4 filesystem breaks the 4KB page size limit to improve write operations. As Linus delayed the release by a week the Linux 6.19 kernel benefitted from an extended eight-week development cycle. This is not the kernel version Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will offer (that’ll be the next one, Linux 6.20/7.10), but Ubuntu users can install Linux […]
January brought major updates to these 6 Linux distros
Linux Mint, MX Linux, and several other saw some exciting changes in January.