Linux NewsCOSMIC Epoch 1.5 Brings More Fixes & Improvements To System76's Desktop
The System76 and Pop!_OS developers continue quickly iterating on their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment...
DRM Format Modifiers For Old AMD GPUs Coming With Linux 7.3: Thanks Valve
Sent out today was another week's worth of features and other code changes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver. We are nearing the cut-off of new feature material for next month's Linux 7.3 kernel but there is some nice feature work in store for this week...
Steam Client Adds HDR Streaming On Steam Deck OLED, AV1 Video Streaming
Today's Steam client beta update brings some new game streaming enhancements for Linux gamers...
Intel Graphics Driver Support For Xe3 "Peak Bandwidth Threshold" Feature In Linux 7.3
Intel today sent out their latest batch of kernel graphics driver updates that are ready for staging ahead of next month's Linux 7.3 merge window...
Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows
Valve has been sponsoring Collabora engineers with early phase, exploratory work for trying to bring the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to Microsoft Windows...
Vibe Coded X11 YSERVER Gets Steam Working, Full-Screen Games With Cinnamon
A new software creation that debuted this summer was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust largely by AI via Claude Code. This YSERVER implementation has continued implementing more X11 protocol and other functionality to get more desktop environments and apps working surprisingly okay on this vibe coded X11 server. YSERVER 1.4 is now available as the latest in this quest...
FreeBSD's Kernel Still Has A Bit Of GPL Code While Its Base User-Space Is GPL-Free
A few weeks ago there was excitement in the FreeBSD camp with FreeBSD 16 set to retire the last of its GPL code from the base system. While the retiring of the dialog code proclaimed that it was the last remaining piece of GPL software in the base system for FreeBSD, it turns out now that there is some GPL code within the FreeBSD kernel...
GCC To Decline Any Significant Contributions Made Via AI/LLMs - Except For Test Cases
The GCC Steering Committee announced today that they have accepted the recommended policy of the GCC AI Policy Working Group, which means no "legally significant" code contributions made via AI/LLM agents will be accepted into this open-source compiler...
ARCTIC Launches Its New Fan Controller That Already Has Mainline Linux Support
In over 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and testing at Phoronix, I have never been more excited for a fan controller... ARCTIC today launched their new Fan Controller and in making the product very unique for Linux users, it already has mainline Linux kernel support via a open-source driver contributed directly by ARCTIC...
Starling: A New Linux Desktop Written In Swift, Own Wayland Compositor & Written With AI
There's yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients...
CachyOS Outperforming Windows 11, Ubuntu & Fedora On AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470
A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux based CachyOS into the benchmarking mix.
AMD P-State Linux Driver Patches Can Boost 1%-Low FPS Gaming Performance By 31%
A set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) boosting for recently-busy CPUs. This feature is designed to have a dramatic impact for Linux gaming and helping especially with the 1% low frame-rates improving by 31.8% on the Valve Steam Deck...
Linux's crypto_rng Abstraction Layer Next On The Chopping Block
In addition to the deprecation and stripping down of AF_ALG, another piece of the Linux kernel crypto code steaming ahead toward removal is the crypto_rng abstraction layer...
KDE Developer Fixing Long-Standing Bug Over Very Long Small-File Copy Times
Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many small files on the KDE Plasma desktop...
ASUS Laptop Whisper Mode Support Being Worked On For Linux
ASUS laptops support a feature called "Whisper Mode" that intentionally slows down the fan speed and lowers the CPU clock speed in order to keep the device running cool and quiet. The open-source ASUS Armoury Linux kernel driver is now seeing patches to properly support this Whisper Mode on Linux...