Linux NewsKDE Plasma 6.6 Beta 2 Released For Testing
Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release...
Solseek TUI Package Manager Is Now Officially Available in Solus
Solus has added Solseek to its stable repositories, bringing a fast, keyboard-driven TUI package manager to users.
Google Axion CPU Performance With The New Google Cloud N4A Instances
Back in 2024 Google rolled out their Axion in-house ARM processors with the Google Cloud C4A instance type. Today they are expanding their Axion offerings in Google Cloud with the N4A instances now out of preview. The Google Cloud N4A instances are designed for scale-out web servers and microservices, containerized applications, back-end application services, databases, data analytics, and cost-effective development/staging/testing environments.
Systemd Founder Lennart Poettering Announces Amutable Company
Systemd founder and lead developer Lennart Poettering announced the creation of a new company called Amutable. The Amutable company being led by Chris Kühl (CEO), Christian Brauner (CTO) and Lennart Poettering (Chief Engineer) will be focused on delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems...
TigerVNC 1.16 Released With "w0vncserver" For Sharing Wayland Desktop Sessions
TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is "w0vncserver" as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops...
Zlib-rs Declares A Stable & Complete API For This Rust-Based Zlib Implementation
Following the release of zlib-rs 0.6 last week, the developers behind this Rust-based Zlib implementation have declared their API stable and complete...
Proton 10.0-4 Brings Compatibility Boost With Dozens of Games Now Playable
Proton 10.0-4 is now available, resolving issues in Far Cry 5, Age of Empires IV, and other titles on Linux and Steam Deck.
Xfwl4 Being Developed As New Wayland Compositor For Xfce
Xfce developers are using their donations from the community to fund a longtime core developer to create Xfwl4, an entirely new Wayland compositor for Xfce...
Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing Merged To Mesa 26.1 For X11 & Wayland
The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland...
New Intel Linux Code For DG2 Graphics Can Improve Performance As Much As "A Whopping 260%"
A set of 18 patches were merged overnight to Mesa 26.1 for working around graphics corruption on Meteor Lake and DG2/Alchemist class graphics hardware. Not only are some graphics corruption issues worked around but for that hardware there is as much as "a whopping 260%" performance improvement observed for some graphics workloads...
ThinkPads On Linux Appear Nearly Ready For Improved Trackpoint Doubletap Handling
Being worked on for a while by Lenovo engineer Vishnu Sankar is nicely handling support for double-tap functionality with TrackPoints on ThinkPads under Linux. The sixth iteration of this enablement work was posted today and is just documentation updates, so it's looking like this new TrackPoint doubletap code could soon be crossing the threshold for the mainline Linux kernel...
Updated Linux Patches For Managing Out-Of-Memory Behavior Via BPF
Being worked on since last year by Google engineer Roman Gushchin was the latest attempt for the Linux kernel to support managing the out-of-memory "OOM" behavior using BPF programs. It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on that front but published overnight is the latest iteration of those patches...
Picolibc Picks Up RISC-V Improvements, Hexagon Support & Better POSIX Compliance
Keith Packard published Picolibc 1.8.11 on Monday as the newest release for his C library designed for embedded 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Picolibc continues tacking on new CPU architecture support and other features for this project that started out as a conglomeration of the Newlib and AVR Libc C library codebases...
Proton 10.0-4 Released with Support for Drop Dead: The Cabin, Quantum Threshold
Proton 10.0-4 is now available with support for Metal Slug: Awakening, Quantum Threshold, Fellowship, Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality, and many other Windows games.
Unofficial AppImage Lets You Run Canva’s Affinity on Ubuntu
Linux lacks native versions of industry-grade creative tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and while open-source options are capable, not everyone is willing to relearn and adapt to different tools. Thankfully, the gap in commercial design software is plugged with workarounds involving Wine, the Windows compatibility layer – which is how you can run Affinity v3 on Linux. Affinity, acquired by Canva in 2024, moved to a freemium model in 2025. Photo, Designer and Publisher tools were merged into a unified app and made free to download and use on Windows and macOS (generative AI features cost, but are optional). […]