Phoronix

For those curious about how Intel's laptop/ultrabook CPUs have evolved over the past few generations and whether it's worthwhile upgrading from one generation to the next, here's a fresh Linux laptop comparison with seven different laptops being tested on Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 and comparing these laptops from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell on a variety of workloads while also doing some performance-per-Watt measurements.

It's been a while since last having anything to report on with Haiku OS, the BeOS inspired open-source operating system. One minor advancement to mention today is they have just landed optional GCC5 compiler support packages...

Version 0.9 of AppStream is now available. As a refresher, AppStream is a FreeDesktop.org specification backed by multiple major Linux distributions as a cross-distribution effort of standardizing Linux component metadata...

Intel Broxton hardware now has open-source OpenCL compute support via the Open-Source Technology Center's Beignet project...

Hans Wennborg has laid out plans to officially release LLVM 3.8 in February...

Linus Torvalds has just tagged the fifth weekly release candidate for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

Yesterday's article titled Are Open-Source Games and Community Game Engines Fading Away? continues to be one of the most-discussed threads in the forums this weekend...

Now that Xeon Skylake processors are becoming easier to find at major Internet retailers along with supported motherboards, here are the parts I used for assembling an Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5 Skylake system if you are interested in doing a similar Linux workstation build. While my complete Xeon E3 1245 v5 Linux review will come shortly, enclosed are also some initial Ubuntu benchmarks as well.

It's been just one week since the last beta update of Kodi 16 but its development steam is sticking to the "release early, release often" and this morning shipped beta #4...

As a lot of people were interested in my basement server room remodel earlier this year for Linux benchmarking (and the sixth month redux) as well as subsequent updates about a very high performance fan for air cooling the systems during the cooler seasons, here's another quick update...

As another year comes to a close, it's getting time for all of our annual recaps. For those curious what the most popular Linux stories so far have been in 2015, here's a look...

This past week my main router I've been using for the past three years failed on me (the ASUS RT-AC66U) so I quickly set out to replace this router with a superior model that can better suit my needs today. The router I ended up going for was the expensive ASUS RT-AC88U, but so far it's working out very well...

If you are thinking of buying a low-capacity, affordable solid-state drive (SSD) as a stocking stuffer this holiday season or just looking for a new SSD without breaking the bank, here are benchmarks from eight different low-cost solid-state drives done on Ubuntu Linux with the EXT4 file-system.

The fourth weekly release candidate to Wine 1.8 is now available...

If Intel OTC developer Rodrigo Vivi has his way, the power-saving PSR functionality may finally be enabled by default for the Intel DRM graphics driver...

Is it just me or are open-source games faltering? While open-source, community-based games really aren't mainstream and really never took off, it seems these days there's a lack of good open-source games more so than in past years as well as diminishing open-source game engine projects...

While it's becoming increasingly harder to find VIA x86 hardware out in the wild and it's been a long while since last writing anything about VIA x86 Linux support, an independent developer is hoping to revive the OpenChrome VIA kernel mode-setting driver and ideally wants to see it mainlined in the Linux kernel...

If you are building a new system around an Intel Xeon Skylake processor that features integrated graphics, you may have some out-of-the-box issues with current stable Linux distributions...

Intel has already queued up a lot of DRM graphics driver changes for Linux 4.5 and now they've sent out a DRM-Next pull request for another serving of updates for this next kernel cycle...

Since last month Krita 2.9 Animation Edition has been in beta as the version of this KDE drawing program that supports animations and uses OpenGL 3 on the GPU for rendering. The second beta of it is now available...

Arch Linux developers have begun phasing out the KDE 4 desktop...

While the Raspberry Pi DRM driver landed for Linux 4.4, with this forthcoming kernel release it doesn't expose any 3D hardware acceleration. However, it looks like that's coming for Linux 4.5..

The Free Software Foundation has certified another laptop as "respecting your freedom" that meets the FSF standards for users' freedom, control, and privacy...

If you have a fast enough Intel graphics processor, Feral Interactive's Linux release of GRID Autosport should run if you are using the latest Mesa...

While I ended up returning my AMD A10-8700P "Carrizo" laptop due to its faulty fan, I did run a few benchmarks of it prior to sending it back. Here's roughly what you can expect in terms of its performance against Intel Core i3 and i5 laptops...

For months now we've been hearing that the initial Vulkan release would happen in 2015, but the number of days left this year are limited...

With having a new Intel Broadwell laptop for testing that came pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows 10 x64, I couldn't resist the opportunity to run some comparison benchmarks against Ubuntu Linux. The Intel HD Graphics 5500 were tested under Windows 10 and then under Ubuntu 15.10 -- both in a stock configuration and then switching over to the Linux 4.4 kernel with Mesa 11.2 Git.

Laércio de Sousa has published the seventh revision of patches to X.Org's KDrive and Xephyr for finishing up support for having full single-GPU, multi-seat capabilities in Xephyr...

Open-source AMD Linux users who are habitual Mesa Git users will want to pull down the latest code...

Feral Interactive passed along word this morning about the XCOM 2 Digital Deluxe Edition is now available for pre-order from Steam, which will be released in February with OS X and Linux support...

Intel developer John Harrison has published a set of 40 patches this morning for rolling out a GPU scheduler in the i915 DRM driver...

Unvanquished Alpha 46 was released this past weekend as the open-source game project's 2015 holiday release...

With the Wine crew shipping new unstable releases every two weeks, the Wine packages that end up in Linux distributions tend to be out of date for fetching the bleeding edge support for running Windows programs on Linux. As a result, Wine developers are stepping up their game in providing packages for popular Linux distributions...

Shortly after today's release of GRID Autosport for Linux, The Creative Assembly finally released the Linux port of Total War: Attila. With running the GRID Autosport benchmarks on a number of cards, I also tossed in this strategy game for running some initial Linux benchmarks of this game with both AMD and NVIDIA graphics.

Mozilla's experimental Servo engine has been ported to run on Wayland's Weston...

Junio Hamano announced the release this afternoon of Git 2.7.0-rc0 with 463 commits since Git 2.6...

For those curious what KDE's Kdenlive non-linear video editor 15.12 update will bring when released next week, here's a look...

In the hours since Feral Interactive released the Linux version of GRID Autosport today, I've been trying out this racing game on a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards atop Ubuntu Linux. Here are my initial results for GRID Autosport under Linux with seven different graphics cards.

Total War: Attila, a strategy game released for Windows back in February, is now available for Linux...

Feral Interactive today announced the release of GRID Autosport for OS X and Linux...

Version 1.5 of the Rust programming language implementation is now available...

Arch Linux has switched over to using the new C++ ABI of GCC 5...

With the two new, low-end Broadwell laptops currently being tested, I was curious whether the Intel HD Graphics 5500 were any faster using Mesa 11.2-devel Git than the current Mesa 11.0 stable packages in Ubuntu 15.10...

Smach Z, the portable/handheld Steam Machine powered by Linux, is moving ahead and hopes to launch to market this time next year...

HyperZ support in the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers has been a bumpy road to say the least but it looks like some more improvements are imminent...

KDE developer Martin Gräßlin has laid out an idea for shifting games from running within desktop environments to instead their own Wayland server, or taking it even lower to having games interact directly with kernel mode-setting and input received via libinput...

As of today, the latest LLVM code now turns on OpenMP support by default...

Richard Hughes has shared that Dell is the first major PC vendor they can now talk about as joining the the Linux Vendor Firmware Service for making it easy to update the UEFI firmware on new systems from the Linux desktop...

Intel's Jorden Justen has landed the long in-progress ARB_compute_shader support inside Mesa. This compute shader support is available for Ivy Bridge "Gen 7" graphics and newer...

I was very excited this morning when hearing from a Phoronix reader about a new solution for potentially saving huge amounts of money on my electricity bill. No, it wasn't spam. Rather, an interesting Kickstarter project for a solution to my numerous Linux systems that have faulty WoL support...