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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...

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...

HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more...

Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow...

It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop support were among the Ubuntu highlights in 2025...

For those using Microsoft's exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also having lower overhead...

As part of the various end-of-year benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix and with Linux 6.19 switching older AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards to the AMDGPU driver by default, I planned for a very large AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on the latest open-source Linux driver for ending out 2025. In the end though I was thwarted by newer AMD RDNA3 / RDNA4 graphics cards regressing hard on Linux 6.19 that led to ending this testing prematurely due to a show-stopping bug. In any case in this article offers a fresh look at older GCN and RDNA graphics cards on Linux 6.19 + Mesa 26.0-devel.

Wine 11.0-rc4 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate in working toward the stable Wine 11.0 release in January...

Google's Propeller is a profile-guided, reflinking optimizer for large codebases. Propeller is built atop LLVM and can allow for whole-program optimizations. Google compiler engineers are now hoping to bring the Propeller tool into the upstream LLVM codebase...

Crowd Supply recently featured LeafKVM, a compact wireless KVM-over-IP device that provides remote access to computers, servers, and HDMI video sources without requiring software on the target system. It captures HDMI video and audio, emulates USB keyboard, mouse, and storage devices, and streams output directly to a web browser. The hardware platform is based on […]

The NeoEyes NE301 by CamThink is described as a low-power edge AI camera built around STMicroelectronics’ STM32N6 microcontroller. The camera combines on-device neural network inference, a built-in web interface, and modular hardware design aimed at battery-powered and outdoor deployments. The camera is based on the STM32N6570 MCU, which integrates an Arm Cortex-M55 core with Helium […]

The Linux 6.19 kernel has been a bit bumpy in the scheduler department but at least one fix is on the way for addressing fallout...

As a wonderful Christmas gift to open-source fans, NVIDIA dropped their proprietary license on the CUDA Tile intermediate representation and has now made the IR open-source software...

One of the pleasant surprises this year was AMD ending the AMDVLK driver development with AMD dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver components on Linux at long last for their Radeon Software for Linux packages. This was arguably long overdue with enthusiasts and Linux gamers long preferring the RadeonSI+RADV Mesa drivers and those drivers even doing very well in recent years for workstation graphics workloads. One of the areas where AMDVLK formerly delivered better performance than RADV was with Vulkan ray-tracing. But RADV ray-tracing improved a lot in 2025 as shown in recent benchmarks. So for this Christmas 2025 benchmarking is a final look at how RADV is going up against the now-defunct AMDVLK driver.

For X11/X.Org fans there is a new Christmas surprise: Phoenix as an in-development X Server written from scratch using the Zig programming language...

As part of my various end-of-year benchmarking comparison articles for looking at the performance evolution of Linux is a fresh look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience when using Ubuntu 25.10 with the latest X1E Concept packages, which includes taking the X1 Elite optimized kernel to the latest Linux 6.18 stable series. Unfortunately, there are significant performance regressions observed compared to a few months ago that just make AMD Ryzen AI and Intel Core Ultra laptops a better choice for Linux laptop users.

Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026 Part 1 You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two.…

One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland. Wayback could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available...

As part of our various "year end" articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news and hardware reviews of 2025...