Lossless data compression is an important tool for reducing the storage requirements of the world's ever-growing data sets. Yann Collet developed the LZ4 algorithm and designed the Zstandard (or Zstd) algorithm; he came to the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo to talk about where data compression goes from here. It turns out that we have reached a point where general-purpose algorithms are only going to provide limited improvement; for significant increases in compression, while keeping computation costs within reason for data-center use, turning to format-specific techniques will be needed.
The Debian GNOME team would like to remove the GTK 2 graphics toolkit, which has been unmaintained upstream for more than five years, and ship Debian 14 ("forky") without it. As one might expect, however, there are those who would like to find a way to keep it. Despite its age and declared obsolescence, quite a few Debian packages still depend on GTK 2. Many of those applications are unlikely to be updated, and users are not eager to give them up. Discussion about how to handle this is ongoing; it seems likely that Debian developers will find some way to continue supporting applications that require GTK 2, but users may have to look outside official Debian repositories.
There still are several months to go until the official Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release -- including one month until the feature freeze and the future Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel is expected to land too before the latter kernel freeze in early April. But for those curious how Ubuntu 26.04 is looking so far for servers, here are some very early benchmarks of it on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" in its present development state. The main motivation here for this early look was stemming from the recent rolling-release CachyOS benchmarks on AMD EPYC and wanting to see how it goes up against the current development state of Ubuntu Linux.
Version 1.6.0 of the Radicle peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for systemd credentials, use of Rust's clap crate for parsing command-line arguments, and more. LWN covered the project in March 2024.
A new merge request opened today for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" by Valve contractor Natalie Vock provides another significant boost for the Vulkan ray-tracing performance in multiple titles...
Last year GlobalFoundries acquired MIPS while an interesting new development announced today is that GlobalFoundries has acquired the ARC Processor IP and its solutions business from Synopsys. The Synopsys ARC Processor IP will be brought into the MIPS umbrella...
Back in December we reported on drafted plans for revitalizing Fedora Games Lab to be a modern Linux gaming showcase. This Fedora Labs initiative has featured some open-source games paired with an Xfce desktop while moving forward they are looking to better position it as a modern Linux gaming showcase...
Going back many years Imagination PowerVR graphics were widely despised by open-source enthusiasts and Linux desktop users for their lack of an open-source GPU driver. But over the past few years the Imagination PowerVR driver focused on their Rogue graphics IP has matured nicely within the Linux kernel and the PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa taking shape too. Paired with Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan, there's a robust open-source PowerVR graphics experience now possible. For those interested in trying out said open-source driver stack, the TI AM62-powered BeaglePlay is an affordable way of doing so for that $99 USD single board computer...
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