System76 engineer Victoria Brekenfeld and Red Hat engineer Sebastian Wick presented at the recent XDC2025 developer conference with their hopes of finally fixing the multi-GPU experience on Linux. As part of this is getting the necessary Wayland protocols in order as well as a new gpu-daemon service for proper multi-GPU handling for the Linux desktop.
KDE Plasma 6.4.6 arrives as the final maintenance update in the stable 6.4 series, featuring key patches for Discover, KWin, and Plasma System Monitor.
Tails is an unusual Linux distribution developed by the Tor Project; it is designed to help users work around internet censorship and avoid surveillance. It is a “portable” operating system that is meant to be run from a USB stick or ISO image and to leave no trace on the computer it was run on. Tails routes connections to the internet over the Tor network and includes a selection of applications and tools suited to working with sensitive documents, communicating securely, and preserving users’ anonymity. The tradeoff, of course, is that Tails is less convenient and requires users to learn a new set of tools to avoid compromising their own security and anonymity. Tails 7.1 was released in October, and it seemed like as good a time as any to take it for a spin.
What if you used a late 80s Unix system for your job or university, but still wanted a nice and pretty GUI to use? Well then, let’s discover a nice selection of window managers and graphical user interfaces that will make your boring installation look awesome!
The GNU project has announced the release of coreutils 9.9, a new stable version of the essential collection of basic file, shell, and text manipulation utilities that form the backbone of nearly every Linux and Unix-like system.
The Rust Coreutils project, which aims to provide a full, modern Rust implementation of the GNU Core Utilities — the essential command-line tools found on every Linux and Unix-like operating system — has announced the release of version 0.4.
Fish shell, a popular user-friendly command-line shell, has announced version 4.2, a new release that builds on the 4.0 series. Among the most visible improvements is an upgrade to history-based autosuggestions, which now properly handle multi-line commands.
Last week when delivering some CachyOS benchmarks against Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 on the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, a few Phoronix readers wrote in with the question or belief that openSUSE Tumbleweed would better perform against CachyOS given the distribution’s select x86_64-v3 packages and other advantages. As it’s been a while since running any benchmarks of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are those benchmarks now in the mix for seeing how the performance compares.
Whenever seeing Linux kernel mailing list patches from Google engineer Eric Biggers it tends to be about performance optimizations to the Linux kernel’s cryptography subsystem. That was once again the case on Sunday with the newest patch series providing some nice gains.
When programs written in BPF (the kernel’s hot-loadable virtual-machine bytecode) call kernel functions (kfuncs), it may be useful for those functions to have additional information about the context in which those BPF programs are executing. Rather than requiring it to supply that information, it would be convenient to let the BPF verifier pass that information to the called function automatically. That is already possible, but a recent patch set from Ihor Solodrai would make it more ergonomic. It allows kernel developers to specify that a kfunc should be passed additional parameters inferred by the verifier, invisibly to the BPF program. The discussion included concerns that Solodrai’s implementation was unnecessarily complex, however.
The MX Linux team has officially released MX Linux 25 “Infinity”, the next major version of the popular Debian-based distribution, now built on Debian 13 “Trixie”.
Catch up on the latest Linux news: MX 25, Devuan 6, IncusOS, Hyprland 0.52, Plasma 6.5.2, NPM 2.13, GNOME 50 ends the X11 era, Mint’s new Cinnamon menu, and more.
Nobody is immune to plane crashes, terrorist attacks, or fatal heart failure – not even Linus Torvalds, who still has the final say in the development of the kernel he named Linux. This worries many, as there is no public record of who or what would take over leadership in case of an emergency.
Two patches queued into the Linux kernel’s build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change.
Queued into the platform-drivers-x86 “for-next” Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window is introducing the handling for the “Rapid Charge” USB-C charging mode to the Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver.
For anyone dealing with Minix file-systems still for this nearly 40 year old creation, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is expected to bring some fixes to the Minix driver for better handling corrupted file-system images.
The lightweight Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), a continuation of the classic KDE 3.5 desktop, designed for users who value traditional layouts without the overhead of modern desktop shells, has announced the release of version 14.1.5, the fifth maintenance update in the R14.1 series.
A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years. The question is whether researchers will be able to take this piece of middle-aged media and rewind it back to the 1970s to get the data off.
I recently added a UPS to my server rack to keep my internet and home network running during a power outage. After unpacking it, I investigated its USB port and discovered it wasn’t for powering other devices. Instead, it connects to a host computer to provide information like battery charge status, remaining runtime, and current load.
MKVToolNix, a set of tools for creating, altering, and inspecting Matroska (MKV) files under Linux systems, has been updated today to version 96.0, a release that brings a couple of new features and several bug fixes.
Bottles, an open-source software tool built on top of Wine that helps users run Windows applications and games on Linux systems by providing a user-friendly GUI, has just released its latest version, 52.1.
On ACPI-enabled systems Linux users can enjoy PCIe M.2 connected peripherals that “just work” without any extra fuss. But for those relying on Device Tree (DT) handling by the kernel, new patches from Qualcomm are working on representing PCIe M.2 connectors within DT files.
Ryzen AI Software as AMD’s collection of tools and libraries for AI inferencing on AMD Ryzen AI class PCs has Linux support with its newest point release. Though this “early access” Linux support is restricted to registered AMD customers.
I’m wondering if there are possibly any tools out there to do this: Declare a color scheme and set them to all apps CLIs and TUIs, either immediately on upon restart of each app individually. I’m on NixOS and looked at Stylix, once properly set up it automatically sets color schemes to apps. To change the color scheme I’d have to rebuild my nix configuration which is slow.
I almost succeeded to set my Librem 5 phone to work as UVC camera for the computer. Things you can almost do yourself on Linux phone are so much fun then propriety app that do them on android.@tuxdevices @[email protected] @[email protected]
This week something that I know a lot of people have been wanting for a long time was implemented: the ability to limit virtual desktops to only the primary screen! Thanks very much to Kristen McWilliam for this long-awaited feature, which arrives in Plasma 6.6.
In addition to GNOME’s Mutter compositor removing its X11 back-end support to focus exclusively on Wayland while keeping around XWayland client support, another notable GNOME change this week was the GTK toolkit adding a “reduced motion” accessibility option
It’s been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days.
German Linux hardware manufacturer TUXEDO has announced the launch of its new InfinityBook Max 15, a 15.3-inch business ultrabook that blurs the line between professional workstation and gaming laptop.
I promise this isn’t a rant or cry for help; I’m just sharing an interesting observation that the Linux community might appreciate. Please know I’m comfortable and knowledgeable enough to be dangerous on any platform, though I generally prefer Unix/Linux and macOS over Windows. I inherited an obsolete, under-powered MacBook Air (Intel i5, 4G RAM, 128G SSD) and I’ve been testing virtually every popular distro on it for the last few months. I encountered the same Linux shortcoming across every distro, and I thought some of y’all might find this mildly interesting.
Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development code.
It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical’s LXD project as Incus. Now joining the Incus family is IncusOS as an immutable Linux OS built atop a Debian base with OpenZFS file-system support and designed around running containers with Incus
Merged yesterday to the mainline Linux 6.18 development kernel were the latest round of x86 platform driver fixes. Mostly some small fixes but standing out is electronic privacy screen hotkey support for some Dell laptops.
Filesystems are complex and performance-sensitive beasts. They can also present security concerns. Microkernel-based systems have long pushed filesystems into separate processes in order to contain any vulnerabilities that may be found there. Linux can do the same with the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) subsystem, but using FUSE brings a significant performance penalty. Darrick Wong is working on ways to eliminate that penalty, and he has a massive patch set showing how ext4 filesystems can be safely implemented in user space by unprivileged processes with good performance. This work has the potential to radically change how filesystems are managed on Linux systems.
LXQt 2.3 has been released today as the latest stable version of the lightweight desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems, an update that brings new features and improvements.
CodeWeavers announced this morning a new CrossOver Preview that includes Linux ARM64 support for the first time. This commercial software built atop Wine is now comfortable with the state of running Windows x86/x64 apps on Linux ARM64 and even the ability ro enjoy many Windows games on ARM64 Linux devices like the System76 Thelio Astra.
With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop.
So I have two SSDs in my laptop running FedoraKDE, and every time I mount the one used for storage, I have to type the luks password and then my root password. So, looking it up, I found that to not need root to mount the drive I need to add it to fstab.
Although Wayland has been GNOME’s default session since 2016, X11 has continued to linger in the codebase—until now. That changed with the recent merging of two PRs (here and here), which completely removed the X11 codebase from both Mutter, GNOME’s default window manager and compositor, as well as the GNOME Shell itself.
FEX 2511 is out today for this open-source emulator akin to Apple’s Rosetta that allows running x86/x86+64 applications on ARM64. But in the case of FEX, for ARM64 Linux devices and akin to other open-source projects like Box64.
Hey it’s me, the guy that posted here a couple weeks ago asking for bare minimum concepts new Linux users should understand. I really appreciate the responses I got last time, and now I’m back with my first draft! It’s not 100% complete, but I’d love some feedback from the Linux community, let me know if there’s anything I missed or that you think should be covered that I didn’t yet talk about.
I think about switching from Spotify for a longer time now, but with the recent ICE ads I want to be in solidarity with the people in the US and kick Spotify out.
Among the notable improvements, the driver introduces a new environment variable, CUDA_DISABLE_PERF_BOOST, allowing users to disable CUDA’s default behavior of automatically boosting GPU clock speeds to higher power states during compute workloads.
The ARMEL and MIPS64EL architectures have been dropped from Debian unstable and experimental. This is the end of the road for these aging ARM and MIPS targets in the Debian world.
The KDE team has announced the release of Plasma 6.5.2, the second bugfix update to the major Plasma 6.5 series. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.2 focuses on refinement and reliability.
Marketplaces and e-waste recycling centers are practically overflowing with the things: ARM-based streaming TV boxes that run some — usually very outdated and compromised — version of Android. While you can use them for their promised streaming purposes, they’re invariably poorly optimized and often lie about their true hardware specifications. Which leaves the most important question: can you install Linux on these SBCs and use them as a poor man’s Raspberry Pi alternative? The answer, according to [Oleksii’s Tech] on YouTube is ‘sorta’.
Queued up in a TIP branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window opening in about one month’s time is optimizing the Restartable Sequences “RSEQ” code for its exit to user-space code path.
I’m asking because they’re might be a way for me to have a Linux laptop at work. But I’d like it to be connected to the Active Directory for login and other accesses. I’m specifically thinking of installing either Kubuntu or Zorin OS. (Zorin seems better)
Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical’s vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation.
Devuan 6.0 “Excalibur” is now available as the fork of Debian GNU/Linux without the use of systemd. Devuan 6.0 is Debian 13 but for “init freedom” lets you use either SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system.
Scopri Recall for Linux, il progetto ironico che porta le funzionalità di registrazione continua dello schermo su Linux, ispirandosi a Microsoft Recall. Tra satira e riflessione sulla privacy.
#Linux #Microsoft #Privacy #Software
Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it’s above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve’s Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet.
Is there anything obviously wrong or bad about the idea to just use whatever distro you like on bare metal. Like rolling release to get the fastest updates or immutable to make it rock solid. And then just use distrobox or toolbx with Debian and maybe Arch to run software your base distro does not provide?
Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers.
The kernel’s file-I/O subsystems have been highly optimized over the years in the hope of providing the best performance for a wide variety of workloads. There is, however, one workload type that suffers with current kernels: applications that perform many short reads, in multiple processes, from the same file. Kiryl Shutsemau has been working on a patch to try to optimize this case, but the task is turning out to be harder than one might expect.
What could be the best way to introduce the world of computers to a kid, let’s say of 6 years old, so that he learns to handle it like a toy and stops dreading it like some esoteric, arcane and recondite machine from some eldritch, enigmatic, cryptic and phantasmal world ?
Always thought top was one of those programs frozen in time since the 70s, but apparently, it has a feature set comparable to htop and the like. The default configuration just doesn’t show much of it…
This was made for mobian with phosh. Not sure if it will work on other distros. You can always install a dct tool to decompile it and hand copy the opp-tables for the CPU and GPU or something for yours if this doesn’t work.
PieFed.ca
mesa
Blaze (he/him)
Sunshine (she/her)
bhyoram
recursive_recursion
Otter Raft
Meldrik
malfisya
