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Firefox 121 is aiming to ship with Wayland support enabled by default rather than falling back to XWayland on modern Linux desktops. So far things are looking up for this indeed remaining the case for next month's Firefox 121 stable release...

Over four years after the debut of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 and in the interim since also working on the ROME rolling-release platform, OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 finally debuted today...

Debian's MIPS64EL that is a 64-bit little endian port using the N64 ABI is at risk due to declining access for building the Debian 64-bit MIPS packages. MIPS64EL is now being treated as an "out of sync" architecture due to lacking sufficient build daemon resources for timely building new packages and if the situation doesn't improve, it may not be suitable as a release architecture for Debian 13 "Trixie"...

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced this morning the launch of the TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen1, their first all-AMD powered Linux gaming laptop...

The KDE Plasma 6.0 feature freeze is quickly approaching and the Plasma Wayland showstopper bug list is nearly cleared out for being able to endorse the Plasma Wayland session over X11...

Eric Engestrom on Friday released the fifth weekly release candidate of Mesa 23.3 with this quarterly stable release hopefully debuting in the next week...

While the winter holidays are approaching so far it hasn't led to any reduced effort in the GNOME camp. In fact, fresh off the 1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, there are several new exciting initiatives moving forward along with other ongoing enhancements driven by GNOME developers...

Wine 8.21 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine and the final one prior to the feature freeze coming up in two weeks...

For those wondering about the air cooling prospects for DIY builds with the new 350 Watt AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors, here's a brief look at the new Noctua heatsink options for the Socket sTR5 processors and the results in use with a Threadripper 7980X 64-core / 128-thread workstation.

While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver is well received by the community, one of the longest sought features has been an official GUI control panel for managing the driver settings and the like under Linux with ease. AMD for their part exposes much of the same tunables available under Windows but is left to just command-line controls or software to poke different ioctls directly. LACT is now the newest open-source option for those wanting an AMD graphics driver control panel for Linux...

Intel on Thursday committed Arrow Lake "ARL" support to their open-source Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by their Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and Level Zero while on Windows IGC is additionally used as their graphics shader compiler as well...

In time for any holiday gaming, Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.11 as its Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying the latest Windows games on Linux...

Following yesterday's week drm-misc-next pull that added the new Imagination PowerVRM DRM driver, the three patches for atomic DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC were queued into drm-misc-next. Now that this atomic async page flip support is in drm-misc-next, next week it should appear in DRM-Next and in turn make it for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year...

GIMP 3.0 could be finally released in a few months if all goes very well...

Released on Thursday were the Linux v6.7-rc2-rt1 real-time "PREEMPT_RT" patches that now re-bases the RT patches against the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel series...

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.41 debuted this week as the newest version of this OpenJDK JVM focused on a small footprint and fast performance...

It's been well over a decade since many were wanting open-source Imagination PowerVR graphics when their graphics IP was more common among SoCs, but with the Linux 6.8 kernel in early 2024 there will finally be an upstream, open-source PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver! But before getting your hopes too high, this is the effort that's only around the newer PowerVR graphics and not the prior generation hardware from many years ago...

PHP 8.3 is out today as the latest major annual update to the PHP programming language...

OpenSSL 3.2 was released this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used cryptography and SSL/TLS project...

LibreOffice 24.2 Alpha 1 was just tagged in Git as the first development snapshot toward this next major release of this open-source office software...

The Qt Company today released Qt Creator 12 as the latest major update to this C++ and Qt focused integrated development environment. Most significant with Qt Creator 12 is integrating the Compiler Explorer while there are also many smaller changes for this Qt/C++ optimized IDE...

The very convenient Archinstall for quickly deploying new Arch Linux installations with some level of defaults and making it effortless to setup an Arch Linux desktop is out with a new release...

The crew at System76 published a US Thanksgiving themed status update to their work on the open-source, Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment that will soon be powering their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

As a nice US Thanksgiving surprise, AMD engineers on Wednesday posted their initial patches for adding the GFX1200 and GFX1201 targets to the LLVM compiler...

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While Ubuntu 23.10 isn't a long-term support (LTS) release and thus won't see too much exposure in the enterprise space, it's worthwhile today looking at the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon server performance. It's interesting for a look ahead being just a few months until Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and with Ubuntu 23.10 incorporating GCC 13 that will also be the default compiler of Ubunu 24.04 among other close software package versions, the kernel not too far off from what will be in this next LTS release, and with Ubuntu 23.10's Linux 6.5 kernel bringing some nice performance optimizations. So with that said I recently wrapped up some fresh benchmarks looking at the current generation Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids performance against AMD EPYC 9004 Bergamo, Genoa, and Genoa-X processors.

Those using OpenZFS 2.2 will want to update to OpenZFS 2.2.1 right away. A block cloning bug was uncovered that is causing data corruption issues for users...

The Linux Foundation today announced the release of the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.18 for this open-source hypervisor that serves as an alternative to Linux KVM use...

Back during the Linux 6.3 kernel support for a number of legacy DRM drivers was removed and now patches have been volleyed for taking things one step further by now eliminating the infrastructure for supporting these older user-space mode-setting graphics/display drivers...

While micro-architecture specific optimizations are rather common place within the Linux x86_64 kernel for various Intel and AMD CPU families with various performance tricks, the ARM64 Linux kernel maintainers are against introducing new micro-architecture specific optimizations as it affects new ARM processors...

Ahead of the US Thanksgiving holiday extended weekend, NVIDIA Linux engineers published their 545.29.06 Linux driver as the latest bug-fix release in the R545 series...

Thanks to AMD's Linux graphics drivers being open-source, they can be easily ported/adapted for new CPU architectures. For years older AMD Radeon GPUs have been working great on RISC-V such as shown in my HiFive Unmatched review back in 2021 with a Radeon graphics card in the PCI Express x16 slot. But newer AMD Radeon GPUs hadn't worked out-of-the-box due to AMDGPU's "DC" display code but that is changing with new patches from SiFive they are allowing the latest AMD GPUs to work on RISC-V...

Released on Tuesday was a new version of wlroots, the Wayland compositor support library that was born out of the i3-inspired Sway compositor project. With this new release are new Wayland protocols, continued work on their Vulkan renderer, and the ability for the Wayland back-end to embed a wlroots compositor inside an existing Wayland client...

A recently posted Linux kernel driver patch by Lenovo is for a new "ultra-performance capability" with their latest ThinkPad laptops for ensuring their hardware achieves the best Linux performance when in the "performance" ACPI Platform Profile while conserving the most power in the balanced and power-saving mode...

Ahead of AMD's Advancing AI event coming up quickly in early December, AMD today announced ROCm and PyTorch support has been extended to supporting the Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card...

With currently reviewing the HP Z6 G5 A workstation powered by the new 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Zen 4 processor, one of the areas I was curious about was how well HP's tuned Microsoft Windows 11 compares to that of Linux. In this article is looking at how the Microsoft Windows 11 performance is out-of-the-box with the HP Z6 G5 A workstation as configured by HP versus a clean install of Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.5 kernel.

Back in Linux 6.2 the in-kernel Zstd compression/decompression code was updated against the Zstd 1.5 upstream state. Now for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year the plan is for updating to Zstd 1.5.5 that should provide better compression performance...

In addition to Microsoft enabling OpenGL 4.6 over Direct3D 12 via Mesa, Microsoft engineers have also been working on some video improvements within the Mesa code-base...

Intel has announced their 2024 updates to oneAPI that they are promoting as the Intel Software Developer Toolkits 2024 release...

One of the features that was merged yesterday into the GCC compiler just before shifting to its "bug fixing" phase of development was Intel's AVX10.1 support...

FreeBSD 14 has been released as stable today as the newest major release of this leading open-source BSD operating system...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver atop the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for passing all the necessary Vulkan 1.0 conformance test suite cases. Though don't get your hopes too high for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver as the performance is still overall slow and the driver stack remains a work-in-progress, but at least it's a step in the right direction...

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available...

Last month AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series along with the new Threadripper PRO 7000 WX Series for bringing Zen 4 to the HEDT and workstation space. Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available via DIY retailers on the 21st, today marks the review/performance embargo expiration for the Threadripper 7000 series. First up today is a look at how the new Threadripper 7970X 32-core and Threadripper 7980X 64-core processors are performing for Linux HEDT workstations... Or the TLDR: the incredible Linux performance and potential for a wide-range of creator and developer workloads now possible with the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series.

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X/7980X Linux benchmark review shows just how well the new Zen 4 powered HEDT Threadripper processors can perform with up to the 64 core flagship offering. The results were stunning while today the review embargo also expires on the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series for the professional-catered SKUs that offer up to 96 cores and support up to 8 channel DDR5 system memory. Here are the initial benchmarks of the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX for showing the performance potential of this outright workstation performance monster if your budget allows.

Feature development on GCC 14 is now largely over with today marking the start of their stage three of development that is the "general bugfixing mode" and moving past new features for this next annual GNU Compiler Collection release...

Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante's NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously...

Distrobox 1.6 released on Sunday for this open-source project that makes it easy to launch any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Distrobox builds upon Podman and Docker to allow creating containers of the Linux distribution of your choice and for that to integrate nicely with the host environment. With succeeding releases, Distrobox has built up quite an arsenal of features...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.7-rc2 as the second test release of what will become Linux 6.7 stable around the end of the calendar year...

In the absence of Razer providing any official drivers and GUI control panel for Linux systems, the OpenRazer independent open-source project for crafting reverse-engineered driver support and then the likes of Polychromatic as a graphical control utility make for a pleasant Linux experience for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is a new Polychromatic release...