Linux NewsEven if you have 16GB of RAM, this one "compressed swap" trick makes Linux significantly smoother
Experience a smoother, more responsive Linux system, regardless of your RAM capacity, by discovering the world of compressed swap.
KDE Plasma 6.6 Showing Frequent Performance Advantage Over GNOME 50 With NVIDIA R595 Driver
Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6's performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.
Intel Xe Driver Improves Memory Pressure / Out-Of-Memory Behavior For vRAM With Linux 7.1
Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM...
Dovecot 2.4.3 Secure IMAP Server Improves UTF-8 Support for Mail Storage
Dovecot 2.4.3 open-source secure IMAP server, improves UTF-8 storage handling and fixes critical security vulnerabilities.
BPF-Based I/O Scheduler For Linux Demonstrated
With sched_ext there is support for BPF-based CPU scheduling policies for the Linux kernel while now a new initiative is working on BPF-based I/O schedulers...
Calibre 9.6 E-Book Manager Released With New Full Text Search View
Calibre 9.6 introduces a card-based full text search view, a word-prefix search mode, CVE fixes, and various bug fixes for the e-book viewer and content server.
AMD ROCm 7.12 Tech Preview Brings More Consumer APU & GPU Support
In addition to this week's ROCm 7.2.1 stable point release, ROCm 7.12 was also released as the newest tech preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0...
Linux Patches Posted To Fix ~2x Performance Drop For CPU Workloads On NVIDIA Vera Rubin
An important set of Linux scheduler patches were posted for review on Thursday for improving the SMT-aware asymmetric CPU capacity handling. These patches to improve the Linux kernel scheduler around CPU Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is needed after NVIDIA engineers discovered up to a ~2x performance drop for CPU-intensive workloads on their upcoming Vera Rubin platform...
AMDGPU Driver For Linux 7.1 Preps Debug Improvements, New Hardware IP
Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements were sent out this week as feature development for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 7.1 begins to wind down...
Calibre 9.6 Adds New Card-Based View of Full-Text Search Results with Book Covers
Calibre 9.6 open-source e-book management software is now available for download with new card-based view with book covers for full text search results, an improved Bookshelf view, and other changes.
Ubuntu 26.04 Beta is now available to download
The beta release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available to download, a month ahead a planned stable release on 23 April, 2026. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS runs on the latest release candidate of Linux kernel 7.0 (yet to be released), includes the new GNOME 50 desktop release and adds a couple of new default apps, including a new system monitoring utility (Resources). Visual changes introduced include a set of colourful new folder icons, a fully opaque Ubuntu Dock, a new default wallpaper and, albeit a little harder to spit, a new boot spinner animation during system startup. On the backend, […]
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Beta Is Out Now with Linux Kernel 7.0 and GNOME 50
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS operating system is now available for public beta testing with the Linux 7.0 kernel, Mesa 26.0 graphics stack, and GNOME 50 desktop environment.
wlroots 0.20 Released,Sway 1.12-rc1 Available For Testing With Color Management
Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the "heavy lifting" of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager...
FOSS Weekly #26.13: Age Verification Added in systemd, Systemd forked, Btrfs Subvolumes, New Backup Tool, Yazi Manager and More
Controversies all around.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Beta Released: Powered By Linux 7.0 + GNOME 50 + Mesa 26.0
Right on schedule the beta for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available for testing. This is a great opportunity to help test this release ahead of the official Long Term Support release due out on 23 April...