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Merged to Linux Git on New Year's Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel...

The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its "open-source Windows" OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility...

As part of the various end-of-year annual benchmarking comparisons and the like on Phoronix, today is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" performance has evolved under Ubuntu Linux in the two years since launching. Plus with next-gen Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased next week at CES, it's a good time for revisiting the Meteor Lake performance to see the difference two years have made for Intel Meteor Lake laptops on Linux.

A New Year's Eve pull request is ready with several Intel/AMD laptop improvements for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. An x86 platform drivers pull request sent to Linus Torvalds today brings several notable driver enhancements with expanding the range of supported laptops...

Orange Pi closes the year by unveiling new details about the Orange Pi AI Station, a compact board-level edge computing platform built around the Ascend 310 series processor. The system targets high-density inference workloads with large memory options, NVMe storage support, and extensive I/O in a small footprint. The AI Station is powered by an […]

Anaconda installer now supports installation of bootc based bootable container images using the new bootc command. It has supported several types of payload to populate the root file system during installation. These include RPM packages (likely the most widely used option), tarball images you may know from Fedora Workstation, ostree, and rpm-ostree containers. The newest […]

OpenCV 4.13 is out this New Year's Eve in providing the latest open-source computer vision (CV) capabilities. OpenCV 4.13 brings a wide variety of enhancements to this widely-used computer vision library...

December happens to be a busy month for video editor releases in the open-source world. This month there's been the release of Flowblade 2.24, OpenShot 3.4, Kdenlive 25.12, and now there is Shotcut 25.12 before closing out the month and year...

Typically when receiving any review hardware preloaded with Microsoft Windows I tend to run some Windows vs. Linux benchmarks just as a sanity test plus it still seems to generate a fair amount of interest even though the outcome is almost always the same: Linux having a hefty performance advantage over Windows especially in the more demanding creator-type workloads. As an unexpected twist and time consuming puzzle the past two months, when recently testing out the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 it's faster for numerous workloads now on Microsoft Windows 11 than Ubuntu Linux.

Orange Pi has unveiled the Orange Pi 4 Pro, a compact single-board computer designed for high-performance edge applications. It integrates an octa-core Allwinner A733 processor, a 3 TOPS NPU, and supports up to 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory, combining AI acceleration with a wide range of expansion interfaces. This SBC features the same SoC found […]

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 […]

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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 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...

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...