Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its "open-source Windows" OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility...
VLC 3.0.23 open-source media player is now available for download with support for exposing additional audio codec information for FLAC 24-bit, improvements to the dark palette in the Qt interface, and more.
The first FOSS Weekly of the year 2026.
The first FOSS Weekly of the year 2026.
For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager, the project kicked off 2026 by releasing IceWM 4.0...
You don't always need to install an open source software on your desktop or self host in your homelab. I use some of my favorites from the comfort of a web browser.
You don't always need to install an open source software on your desktop or self host in your homelab. I use some of my favorites from the comfort of a web browser.
Zorin OS says it hit 1M downloads in just over a month, mostly from Windows PCs. I installed it to see if it’s a real Windows 10 replacement.
Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications...
Merged to Linux Git on New Year's Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel...
With Linux 6.19 aging AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs switched the default kernel driver used to provide for much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using the legacy Radeon DRM kernel driver. For 2026, Timur KristĂłf of Valve's Linux graphics team has more improvements still planned to enhance these older AMD graphics cards on Linux...
Got time for a final blast through smaller Linux app updates to round out 2025? There will be plenty of big new releases to look forward to in 2026, no doubt. But before we race head on in to another year, I wanted to give one last glance back at software updates that landed in December but which, as ever, I didn’t give a full article to… …But didn’t want to leave out either. Clapper 0.10.0 Clapper media player hit 0.10.0 this month, continuing to expand its “enhancer plugin system”. MPRIS, Server, and Discoverer features are now enhancer plugins. A […]
This looks to be a wrap on 2025, Happy New Year to all the Phoronix readers over the past 21+ years. This year on Phoronix there were 226 original Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles written by your's truly. Plus another 3,286 original open-source/Linux software and hardware news articles this calendar year. Here were the big topics of 2025 for the featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles...
Ncurses 6.6 was released today prior to closing out 2025. This programming library update for creating terminal-based text user interfaces (TUIs) features a variety of great improvements for ending out the year...
Flathub recorded more than 435 million app downloads in 2025, with Firefox, Chrome, and Discord ranking among the platform’s most downloaded apps.
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