Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
NVIDIA's Olympus are the ARM64 cores found within the upcoming Vera CPU that will be paired with Rubin. Olympus cores are claimed to be twice as fast as NVIDIA's current CPU cores found in Grace and based on Neoverse-V2. Earlier this year the open-source compilers landed initial support for Olympus while now a proper CPU scheduling model has been upstreamed into LLVM 22...
Added to the Linux kernel earlier this year was the new X86_NATIVE_CPU Kconfig option to enable compiler optimizations for the local/native CPU in use when building the Linux kernel. In effect about ensuring that the "-march=native" compiler flag is set for the kernel build for optimizing the Linux kernel build for your processor being used. Back with Linux 6.16 I ran some benchmarks of the Linux kernel build with X86_NATIVE_CPU to gauge the impact. Now with the current Linux 6.19 kernel and some different hardware, here are some additional on/off benchmarks for evaluating the impact of the Linux kernel build with X86_NATIVE_CPU...
InputPlumber 0.70 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source input router and re-mapper daemon for Linux systems. With more gaming handhelds coming to market and other controllers as well as the upward trajectory of Linux gaming, InputPlumber is becoming more applicable for this daemon to combine various input devices into different virtual device formats...
An important fix has made it into the X.Org Server XWayland codebase ahead of the new year. XWayland has been fixed to avoid sending incorrect pointer coordinates to X11 clients on pointer enter events...
The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers making up Mesa had another very successful year. Even with all the years being invested into Mesa largely by Intel, AMD, Valve, Red Hat, and others, the upward trajectory continues for Mesa on expanding the hardware support, punctually adding new Vulkan extensions, and racking up other wins...
Begun, the Linux Wars have.
Upgrading to Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS brings the new COSMIC desktop—here’s how to update from 22.04 without breaking your system.
In demonstrating one of the gaps of man pages in modern times and likely having hindered the adoption of the Linux kernel's new mount API, it took more than six years for those system calls to be properly documented within man pages. The Linux "new" mount API was introduced back in mid-2019 with Linux 5.2 and since supported by key file-systems after several years but not until weeks ago was this file descriptor based mount API scoped out within man pages...
SuperTux returns with version 0.7 Beta 1, its first major update in four years, bringing fully rebuilt worlds, new assets, music, and gameplay changes.
Two-year journey from Debian Ports brings LoongArch to the officially supported architecture lineup.
Otherwise, it was just going to rot in storage forever.
A new GNOME Shell extension rethinks the app grid (aka the app picker, app drawer, launcher screen – what do you call it?) by making it scroll vertically instead of horizontally. Y’know, the way it did before GNOME 40 changed it. GNOME 40’s switch to horizontal app grid scrolling in 2021 irked a few of its mice-favouring aficionados. Their main gripe? A vertical mouse scroll wheel to move horizontally feels off. The app grid does have clickable buttons (and supports swipe gestures and keyboard arrow keys too). But GNOME Shell is malleable; the way it is out of the box […]
Hyprland 0.53 tiling Wayland compositor releases with a complete window rule rewrite, breaking config changes, new features, and a long list of fixes.
But it's not entirely Arch Linux's fault. This stems from NVIDIA dropping Pascal support and Arch's decision to push legacy drivers to AUR.
Nate Graham looks back at how 2025 went for the KDE project. Today Plasma is the default desktop environment in a bunch of the hottest new gaming-focused distros, including Bazzite, CachyOS, Garuda, Nobara, and of course SteamOS on Valve's gaming devices. Fedora's Plasma edition was also promoted to co-equal status with the GNOME edition, and Asahi Linux — the single practical option for Linux on newer Macs — only supports KDE Plasma. Parrot Linux recently switched to Plasma by default, too. And Plasma remains the default on old standbys like EndeavourOS, Manjaro, NixOS, OpenMandriva, Slackware and TuxedoOS — which ships on all devices sold by Tuxedo Computers!
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