Linux NewsKDE Plasma 6.6 Beta Released With Plasma Login Manager, Plasma Setup
The KDE Plasma 6.6 beta release is available today for helping to test this next iteration of the Plasma 6 desktop...
3 Linux Mint power-user features nobody talks about
Mint's "beginner-friendly" reputation is hiding some serious power.
Wine 11.0 Released With Many Improvements For Windows Games & Apps On Linux
As expected, Wine 11.0 stable was officially released today. This is a big step forward for this open-source software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) that has been critical to the recent successes of Linux gaming...
Intel's Fantastic New Open-Source Demonstrator For AMX-BF16: Over 4x The Performance At 69% The Power
When it comes to software leveraging Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) functionality in modern Xeon processors, it's largely been limited to AI applications/libraries like oneDNN, OpenVINO, DeepRec, etc. But Intel now has another great open-source real-world AMX demonstrator with their Open Image Denoise library. This open-source library providing high quality denoising filters for images rendered using ray-tracing can end up benefiting big time from AMX-FP16 (AMX-COMPLEX) found with the newest Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors. I ran some benchmarks of their new Open Image Denoise library with AMX-FP16 and was honestly blown away by the results.
Debian Libre Live 13.3 Images Released For Avoiding Non-Free Firmware
Building off this past weekend's Debian 13.3 release is now Debian Libre Live 13.3 images for this derivative that ships the install/live media without any of the non-free firmware assets to remain a free software blessed image...
Canonical Launches Minimal Ubuntu Pro for Secure Cloud Deployments
Canonical expands Ubuntu Pro to minimal cloud images available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
FFmpeg Merges A Number Of Vulkan Improvements To Start 2026
FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan-related imporvements to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Over the past year FFmpeg saw Vulkan shader-based decoding for more video formats, AV1 and VP9 extension work, performance improvements, and other work around Vulkan Video. It will be very exciting to see how FFmpeg delivers in 2026 with Vulkan Video and how the software ecosystem as a whole begins taking up this cross-platform, open industry standard for video encode/decode...
Bcachefs Ships Latest User-Space Utilities With bcachefs-tools 1.35
Kent Overstreet has shipped the latest version of bcachefs-tools, the user-space code complementing the Bcachefs file-system kernel driver. There are a number of improvements present in this latest version with Overstreet remaining committed to advancing Bcachefs even with its current out-of-tree kernel status...
LLVM/Clang 22 Feature Development Ends With Intel Nova Lake, Arm C1 & Ampere1C Support
LLVM/Clang 22 feature development ended overnight with the code now being branched and working toward a stable release likely by the end of February...
wl-proxy Announced As Rust Crate For Proxying Wayland Connections
Announced today on the Wayland mailing list is wl-proxy as a Rust crate for proxying Wayland connections and intercepting/manipulating Wayland messages...
Haiku OS Pulls In Updated Drivers From FreeBSD 15
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project just published a new status report to detail how they ended out the year...
MX Linux 25.1 Beta Brings Back Dual-Init Support, Based on Debian 13.3
MX Linux 25.1 is now available for public beta testing based on the Debian 13.3 release and powered by Linux kernel 6.12.63 LTS.
Zorin OS 18 Hits 2 Million Downloads as Windows Users Drive Growth
Zorin OS 18 has surpassed 2 million downloads in under three months, with more than three-quarters coming from former Windows users.
Microsoft Open-Sources XAML Studio
After 8 years, Microsoft's tool for designing Windows apps is now open source.
auto-cpufreq 3.0 Arrives for Linux with Better Battery Handling and CPU Turbo Control
New release gives Linux laptop users more control over CPU performance while fixing battery detection issues.