The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers making up Mesa had another very successful year. Even with all the years being invested into Mesa largely by Intel, AMD, Valve, Red Hat, and others, the upward trajectory continues for Mesa on expanding the hardware support, punctually adding new Vulkan extensions, and racking up other wins...

The December 14, 2025 release of DietPi v9.20 introduces a new remote desktop server option, continued improvements for popular Arm-based single-board computers, and a broad set of fixes across DietPi tools and software packages. The update focuses on usability, stability, and hardware compatibility, particularly around USB, storage, and backup handling.   DietPi: DietPi is a […]

Background running apps could be the cause for the high CPU usage and system unresponsiveness. Learn how to control hidden background apps in Linux.

An important fix has made it into the X.Org Server XWayland codebase ahead of the new year. XWayland has been fixed to avoid sending incorrect pointer coordinates to X11 clients on pointer enter events...

KDE’s Haruna 1.7 media player improves playlist management, audio replay gain support, and overall stability.

Added to the Linux kernel earlier this year was the new X86_NATIVE_CPU Kconfig option to enable compiler optimizations for the local/native CPU in use when building the Linux kernel. In effect about ensuring that the "-march=native" compiler flag is set for the kernel build for optimizing the Linux kernel build for your processor being used. Back with Linux 6.16 I ran some benchmarks of the Linux kernel build with X86_NATIVE_CPU to gauge the impact. Now with the current Linux 6.19 kernel and some different hardware, here are some additional on/off benchmarks for evaluating the impact of the Linux kernel build with X86_NATIVE_CPU...

Discover a step-by-step guide to install the latest version of Steam on Ubuntu and other Linux distros with practical examples.

QEMU 10.2 has been released today as the latest stable version of this open-source machine emulator and virtualization software, a release that brings new features and improvements for next-generation emulation.

One of the more interesting announcements over the holiday period thus far is that moving into 2026, CachyOS is looking to develop a server edition for their Arch Linux based operating system. CachyOS has garnered quite a following among Linux enthusiasts and gamers for its competitive out-of-the-box performance, employing some of the optimizations by Intel's now defunct Clear Linux distribution, and pulling in all of the goodness from upstream Arch Linux. It will be very interesting to see how CachyOS Server Edition takes shape and whether it will develop a foothold in any prominent enterprise environments. While CachyOS Server Edition isn't yet released and still in its early stages, over the holidays I decided to see how CachyOS in its current form currently looks for AMD EPYC servers.

Hyprland 0.53 tiling Wayland compositor releases with a complete window rule rewrite, breaking config changes, new features, and a long list of fixes.

One of the unexpected Linux kernel surprises of 2025 was NTFSPLUS being announced as a new driver for Microsoft's NTFS file-system with better performance and more features compared to the classic read-only NTFS driver or the "NTFS3" kernel driver that Paragon Software submitted upstream. That NTFSPLUS driver has continued expanding its feature set and robustness and sent out today was the third iteration of the patches. Now this driver is simply being called "NTFS" with no longer going by the NTFSPLUS name...

A mainstay of KDE development news is about to change: Nate Graham wants to step back from his “This Week in Plasma” column and is inviting others to carry it forward.

One of the many interesting Linux kernel innovations I have closely been following this year has been the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling support. I have shown the Cache Aware Scheduling performance on AMD EPYC as well as the Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids performance, but what about desktops? In this article is a quick look at Cache Aware Scheduling with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D...

The Orbitiny Desktop Pilot 8 pre-release delivers its most substantial update yet, featuring a new graphical installer and a rebuilt desktop core.

Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of SuperTux as the open-source jump-n-run game that used to be included on some early Linux live CD/DVDs for this Super Mario Bros inspired game. There hasn't been a new release of SuperTux in over four years but out today is the beta of SuperTux 0.7 as a major overhaul to the free software, family-friendly game title...

In this article, you will learn how to install OpenJDK (including JDK and JRE) in major Linux distributions with hands-on examples.

In addition to today's blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition "nears completion" as it works to become Wayland-only in early 2027...

The 272nd installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here for the week ending on December 28th, 2025, keeping you updated with the most important things happening in the Linux world.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.19-rc3 to ship this week's fixes. Linux 6.19-rc3 is coming in light as expected due to the Christmas week with many corporate developers getting paid time off and others taking part in year-end festivities...

With a simple setting change, you can help KDE developers make better decisions about Plasma improvements. Here’s how.

Ahead of Intel Core Ultra "Panther Lake" laptops expected to be showcased in just over one week at CES in Las Vegas, new Xe3_LPD firmware binaries were upstreamed today to linux-firmware.git in getting ready that production-ready support for Intel Panther Lake on Linux...

Fish Shell 4.3 introduces smarter theming, improved completions, better terminal integration, and many changes across scripting and interactive features.

Similar to AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs where there was product overlap between the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers (and now using AMDGPU by default for those aging Radeon GPUs with Linux 6.19), the Intel Arc A-Series "Alchenist" graphics cards are in a similar boat. By default the Alchemist and Meteor Lake graphics use the i915 kernel driver by default but they can optionally use the Xe kernel driver instead as what is Intel's modern open-source kernel graphics driver. As part of our various year end 2025 benchmarks, today is a look at the current i915 vs. Xe driver performance for the Intel Arc Graphics A580.

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Parrot 7.0, elementary OS 8.1, Fish Shell 4.3, OpenMediaVault 8, Inkscape 1.4.3, QEMU 10.2, Kitty Terminal 0.45, Winux tries to mimic Windows, CachyOS plans new server edition, and more.

Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world...

"I've never seen a company so astoundingly out of touch with the people who want to use its software."

GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas...

The court ruled, SFC fired back, and Linus couldn’t resist weighing in. Here’s what actually happened.

As part of the many different year-end benchmarks on Phoronix, over the holidays I was curious about how far the Blender 3D modeling software's performance has evolved over the past few years. So in looking at the CPU rendering performance I ran benchmarks of the major releases since Blender 3.0 through the recently released Blender 5.0...

The Simple DirectMedia Library that is widely-used by many cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime now has better support for handling more mouse button events under Wayland...