Phoronix

As another recent Firefox Nightly change besides enabling WebGL 2 by default is that Firefox's just-in-time compiler supports W^X protection...

DNF 1.1.5 is available today to mark the new year and provide a number of bug fixes for this package manager used on modern versions of Fedora Linux...

With Linux 4.4 expected next weekend, here's a look at some of the early features we've already been talking about on Phoronix that should be on the table for the Linux 4.5 merge window...

Just ahead of CES, AMD/RTG is allowing more details on their next-generation Polaris GPU architecture to be revealed...

The maturing of Wayland (and Mir) as well as external projects like libinput have clearly had an impact on the X.Org Server's development... In 2015 there were fewer xorg-server commits than any year since 2003. Other indicators also point to dramatically slower X Server development...

There is just four weeks to go until the annual Free Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM)...

While GNOME's Outreachy program for this term just began in December and will be running through March, the under-represented participants are already making progress on the GNOME Maps program...

Linus Torvalds tagged the release a short time ago of the Linux 4.4-rc8 kernel...

For those relying upon PlayOnLinux for playing various Windows games on Linux rather than using CodeWeavers' CrossOver or interacting with Wine directly, the newest version of this open-source program is now available...

For those that didn't hear, Python developers will be abandoning their Mercurial-based repository and development workflow in favor of using a Git repository via GitHub...

In 2015 there was 5,466 commits to the systemd repository, which was noticeably more than any year in the past...

It's been nearly one year now that we've been getting excited over VLC 3.0. While we haven't heard any major updates recently and the release has yet to take place, progress continues to be made...

Volvox features the Trimoebas, who are triangular shaped unicellular organisms living in the primordial soup. They have but one goal in life: build the first multicellular organism. Simple, right?

While Jolla was saved last month by a fresh round of financing, even now not everyone who backed the Jolla Tablet project on IndieGoGo will be receiving a tablet...

Fedora Rawhide -- the unstable, nightly grounds of Fedora Linux -- had enjoyed improvements in 2015 to ensure users of it have a better experience while more improvements are still planned for the year ahead...

While there will be many Android-powered devices, various appliances powered by Linux from drones to kitchen appliances, and other products internally relying upon Linux and open-source software, don't expect to find much with regard to the Linux desktop and even Steam Machines will seem to be rather low-key...

If you are just a casual user of the Linux virtualization stack with the open-source virt-manager, you might not know that for months they have already been supporting UEFI-based installations inside virtual machines...

Arch Linux is now shipping PHP 7.0 via their stable repositories for those relying upon it for web servers or other purposes from an installation of this rolling-release distribution...

One of the most viewed and commented topics on Phoronix this week has been about the untimely passing of Ian Murdock, founder of Debian and former leader of Sun's Project Indiana OpenSolaris project...

The second development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 "Gamvik" is now available for all your bleeding-edge, open-source, cross-platform benchmarking needs...

CME is a new tool to assist in maintaining Debian packages...

The Steam Survey results for December 2015 are now available and the reported Linux use remains below 1%...

Alexandre Prokoudine of GIMP has written an annual report on the project and its GEGL port...

Support for altering the PCI Express speed with the Nouveau DRM driver is still being worked on for improving the open-source NVIDIA driver's performance...

Kieran Kunhya with some documentation in hand and a lot of reverse engineering has been working on allowing support for the GoPro Cineform HD codec from the open-source Linux desktop...

Similar to yesterday's look at the Linux kernel Git code with its nearly 20.8 million lines, I also ran some Git statistics on Mesa to see how its development numbers panned out for the year...

For those recovered from the New Year, here's a look at the most popular Linux/open-source topics that appeared on Phoronix in December...

Ilia Mirkin has seemingly not taken much time off from his Mesa hacking for the holidays. On Thursday this developer who most frequently works on the Nouveau and Freedreno drivers has published patches for better ARB_multi_draw_indirect handling...

Matthew Garrett presented this week at the Chaos Computer Club's 32C3 conference about the state of boot security...

Thanks to everyone who supported Phoronix in 2015 and here's to a Happy New Year to all our readers and may 2016 be even more interesting and fruitful...

The developers working on Calculate Linux decided to release a new version of their Gentoo-based Linux operating system before heading to New Year parties...

The mainline Linux kernel is up to 20.86 million lines spread across more than 52 thousand files, as the latest statistics for the kernel as we end out 2015...

For users of Firefox Nightly builds, WebGL 2 support is now enabled...

This year saw the release of GCC 5, many new features to LLVM Clang, the release of PHP 7, Rust 1.0 was released, Apple open-sourced their new Swift programming language, Microsoft has been pushing .NET in the open, and many other exciting advancements for open-source compilers and programming languages...

Thomas Schoebel-Theuer on behalf of Germany's 1+1 Internet continues working on bringing MARS to the upstream Linux kernel...

Following the recent release candidate, Deepin 15 is now officially available for ending out 2015...

Similar to the recent open-source year end driver recaps, here's a recap of NVIDIA's binary driver activities for 2015 along with some benchmarks comparing the performance of the proprietary driver over the past year.

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...