Back in March Steam on Linux use shot up to 5.33% as a big 3.1% improvement over February. In April it dropped to 4.52% and then fell to 3.99% in May. Valve just published the Steam Survey numbers for June and it points to another minor setback from the recent all-time high of Steam on Linux...
When a BPF program is used to filter or redirect packets in the networking subsystem, the program will often want to associate data with each packet as it moves through the kernel. The kernel's local BPF storage API, which associates extra data with some kernel objects, provides a way to do that. (See also the BPF map types that end in STORAGE.) Amery Hung and Jakub Sitnicki led two sessions at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about how to make accesses to local storage data more efficient. Hung spoke about general performance problems related to locking, while Sitnicki examined the use of local storage in the networking subsystem in particular.
With the start of the new month comes a new progress report on the KDE Linux distribution for the prior month. Even with KDE developers being busy to ship Plasma 6.7 in June, they still accomplished a lot when it comes to KDE Linux...
Fwupd 2.1.6 Linux firmware updater is now available for download with a new HSI attribute for coreboot verified boot, hashes for the latest DBX for offline machines, as well as various other improvements.
Firefox is adding hardware-accelerated Vulkan Video decoding, saving Nvidia users on Linux the hassle of manually configuring the nvidia-vaapi-driver package. The change will be included in Firefox 153, out July 21, but it will not be enabled by default β not to start with. Instead, users will be able to flip a pair of preferences in about:config to try it out, with the awareness that there may be hiccups and edge cases (especially on devices with hybrid graphics, mentioned further down). Given that Nvidia GPUs are capable (understatement klaxon), I was surprised to hear that this didnβt already work. Turns out, Firefoxβs [β¦]
Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems rely on certificates issued by Microsoft to verify the software used to boot a system is trusted by the user. One of those certificates expired recently, but that will not cause systems that are able to boot to stop doing so. There are situations where the expiration may cause problems, however, and the window for relying on existing signed binaries is shorter than it might appear. Users and administrators will want to stay on top of these changes. Over the last year, part of my job at Microsoft has been to work on this problem. LWN wrote about the certificate expiration in July 2025, and this article follows up with where we are now.