Phoronix

Continuing on with our other year-end looks, here are lists of the most popular GNOME and KDE desktop happenings of the year...

Webmin, the open-source project offering web-based system/server administration on Linux and an alternative to cPanel, is out with a new release after being a few months in development...

The open-source Nouveau driver has hooked up support for OpenGL's relatively new ARB_shader_draw_parameters extension...

Microsoft has blocked a Linux game port from happening over their publishing deal with a studio...

Tomorrow is the last day for taking advantage of our 2015 Phoronix Premium holiday deal...

Debian's founder, Ian Murdock, has passed away...

The latest win for GNU's Gold linker is with the Rust programming language...

A widely-cited blog post about the major Linux desktop problems has been updated for 2016...

Last week I wrote about some of the open-source / Linux letdowns of the year while today's article is looking at some of the positives from throughout the year...

While NVIDIA has a ways to go on the open-source driver side, when it comes to proprietary drivers on Linux the green graphics giant continued to dominate with their high quality proprietary driver that continued adding in new features...

Microsoft has reportedly said that Windows 10 has been installed on 200 million devices so far worldwide...

With SteamOS being based off Debian, it was another successful year for this Linux distribution but there was also much more to be excited about as Debian users...

This year Ubuntu switched over to using systemd in place of Upstart, other distributions have also decided to take advantage of systemd, this project hosted its first conference, and the systemd feature-set continued to expand...

For those fortunate enough to have a POWER8 system running Linux, the LLVMpipe software rasterizer should now be running faster...

With the releases this year of Fedora 22 and Fedora 23, Fedora stakeholders should be proud of themselves with the quality of Fedora releases/support continuing to go up while driving a lot of new innovation and success into Linux. About the only gripe I have with the latest Fedora releases is that they no longer ship with any fun codenames to talk about.....

Unigine Corp has shared a video of some new rendering tech that they're working on for their advanced engine in 2016...

Both Wayland and Mir advanced a lot in 2015...

If you happened to receive some new computer hardware this Christmas or are weighing a possible upgrade with Skylake PCs becoming more common and AMD Zen coming out next year, you might as well benchmark your system against our vast collection of other systems to see how the performance stacks up...

Eric Anholt is hoping to see mainline support for the Raspberry Pi 2 with the Linux 4.5 kernel...

Back on Christmas was news of patches for implementing tessellation shader support for Intel Ivy Bridge and Haswell graphics hardware after support had already landed for Broadwell and newer within the Mesa driver. Support for those older generations is now present in Mesa...

DragonFlyBSD's Francois Tigeot has done some more great work in allowing their open-source Intel graphics driver to be more featureful and comparable to the Linux i915 kernel DRM driver for which it is based...

WebKitGTK+ WSA-2015-0002 was made public today as a security advisory with more than 100 vulnerabilities being mentioned...

Back in October we heard Ubuntu was planning for better ZFS support and to make it part of the distribution's "standard offering." Work in that direction has continued to advance for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...

This year the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver (Nouveau) continued to evolve with improvements for re-clocking, the start of OpenGL 4 support, and other new functionality. Here's a recap along with some performance benchmarks showing how the OpenGL performance evolved over the past 12 months.

AMD's open-source graphics driver stack continued maturing in 2015 while Catalyst (now known as Radeon Software) releases were rare. AMD's open-source driver stack now supports OpenGL 4.1 for GCN GPUs and select pre-GCN graphics cards plus the other driver stack also matured in other ways this year...

As part of our end-of-year testing, a Phoronix reader had inquired about whether Linux made any strides in 2015 for improving power efficiency or extending battery life for any broad number of mobile Linux systems...

Ubuntu Linux made a lot of headway in 2015 particularly around their Unity 8 and Mir projects as part of their converged vision between mobile and desktop devices as well as in the Snappy space and the growing IoT market...

Here's another open-source contribution for Microsoft's list of unusual open-source/Linux announcements this year: they've added a CodeView library to LLVM...

Linus Torvalds has taken a break from the holidays to announce the seventh weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

The Rockchip DRM driver for supporting the display component of the company's ARM SoCs is now ready with its support for atomic mode-setting...

This year Mesa made a heck of a lot of progress on advancing open-source 3D driver support for Linux and other operating systems. While Mesa isn't yet caught up with OpenGL 4.5, over the past twelve months there was a heck of a lot of progress made on OpenGL 4 support...

The Solus 1.0 release didn't happen on Christmas as originally planned, but nevertheless it's available this morning for its premiere release and formal introduction of its own desktop environment...

With the year ending, of course, I'm already planning ahead and looking out for next year -- when Phoronix will be turning 12 years old. I'd much appreciate it if Phoronix readers find time over this holiday weekend or in the days ahead to complete a brief survey...

Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand has published a patch set today for providing real function support inside NIR, the new Mesa intermediate representation...

If using APT with PDiff enabled for package diffs to do incremental updates, the latest code should now be much faster...

This year was a stellar year for Linux gaming with seeing hundreds of new native game releases and more...

Yesterday I published our usual end-of-year results showing how AMD's open-source driver evolved in 2015 with regard to its OpenGL performance. For your viewing pleasure today are similar results but on the Intel Haswell side looking at how the open-source Intel Linux driver performance changed since the end of 2014.

The beta releases are out today for Linux Mint 17.3 in the Xfce and KDE desktop forms. Linux Mint 17.3 will be an Ubuntu-based LTS release supported until 2019...

Coming in Q1'2016 with the Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 release will be the long overdue overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org with a brand new user-interface, restored search capabilities, and other new features...

The developers behind OpenRA, the open-source re-implementation of the original Command and Conquer games with a focus on cross-platform support, issued a new version of their engine for Christmas...

Steam has had a very rough day with first being hit by a DDoS attack and then a major security hole...

Aethercast is a new Canonical-led project for enabling wireless display support on Ubuntu...

With Wine 1.8 having been released last week, Wine 1.9.0 was released today as the first development snapshot leading to the Wine 1.10 release in 2016...

Within the basement server room there have now been over 500,000 benchmarks completed for Phoronix and LinuxBenchmarking.com...

Ruby 2.3 was released for Christmas with many new features...

As part of our round-ups of the most popular open-source/Linux content over the course of the year, many year-end performance benchmarks, etc, here's a look at the most exciting GNU news of the year...

A few days ago Intel landed OpenGL tessellation support in their open-source driver as required by OpenGL 4. However, this initial implementation was limited to support Intel's Broadwell hardware and newer. With new patches, that is now changing...

One of the most requested end-of-year articles by Phoronix Premium readers was to compare the performance of AMD graphics cards at the end of 2014 on the open-source driver compared to how they compete these days with the very latest open-source driver code. Well, as one of our Christmas 2015 articles, here's this comparison with a few different Radeon GPUs.

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, another holiday, an excuse to enjoy a few drinks, or simply just enjoying the end of the year and time off work, enjoy and happy holidays from Phoronix...

While we primarily focus on Linux operating system news and releases, I do enjoy watching the *BSD space and covering their major events. This year has saw some great updates for DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, and friends. Here's a look at the most popular BSD news on Phoronix for 2015...