The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now announced sponsorship tiers in hopefully to solicit more donations from larger organizations…

LLM makers may be training on user chat with few privacy safeguards, lawmakers hearThe US House of Representatives has heard that LLM builders can exploit users’ conversations for further training and commercial benefit with little oversight or concern for privacy risks.…

The CL260 is presented as an ultra-compact industrial edge gateway built around Intel N-Series processors. It is intended for deployments that require a small, durable, and headless controller operating within cabinet-mounted or space-restricted environments. The system offers configuration options for storage, wireless connectivity, and operating systems. The system uses either the Intel N150 or Intel […]

PHP 8.5 has been released today as the latest major update of this widely-used, general-purpose, and open-source scripting language that is especially suited to web development.

Released tonight was the Intel Compute Runtime 25.44.36015.5 as their roughly monthly update to this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support for Intel’s integrated and discrete graphics hardware…

Zorin OS 18 has reached 1M downloads, with 78% from Windows users, but the test upgrade path from 17 to 18 is currently broken.

Unfashionable web workhorse refreshed for its ongoing runPHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser, marking one of the scripting language’s more substantial updates.…

Dell announced today that their new Pro Max 16 Plus laptop with a Qualcomm discrete NPU is now shipping… That is if you are running Ubuntu Linux while the Windows 11 pre-load option is expected in early 2026. An exciting twist with the Linux version of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus shipping before Microsoft Windows…

Canonical has been bullish on RISC-V with Ubuntu being one of the most common Linux distributions endorsed by RISC-V board vendors. Canonical also has been bullish on the Flutter toolkit for crafting their desktop installer UI and other modern UI/app interfaces. But these two together haven’t panned out with Flutter not currently supporting RISC-V. Canonical has submitted pull requests now for enabling RISC-V support with Flutter…

PHP 8.5 is out today as the annual major feature release for this popular scripting language…

Wireshark, the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer, has been updated today to version 4.6.1, a minor point release to the latest and greatest Wireshark 4.6 series, addressing various bugs and updating protocol support.

PHP 8.5 introduces a new URI extension, the pipe operator, and key syntax upgrades, delivering faster performance and cleaner code.

An updated version of the Steam Linux Runtime 4 branch was rolled out that has now shifted from Debian 11 to Debian 13 libraries for some significant upgrades. In the process more libraries have gone x86_64 only in foregoing the i386 builds. In addition, the SDL 2 library support for the Steam Runtime is now provided by sdl2-compat as the compatibility layer for SDL2 atop SDL3…

We’re closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today’s batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements…

In July, Collabora announced
the Rust-based Tyr
GPU driver for Arm Mali
GPUs. Daniel Almeida has posted an update
on progress with a prototype of the driver running on a Rock 5B board
with the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip:

The Tyr prototype has progressed from basic GPU job execution to
running GNOME, Weston, and full-screen 3D games like SuperTuxKart,
demonstrating a functional, high-performance Rust driver that matches
C-driver performance and paves the way for eventual upstream
integration! […]

Tyr is not ready to be used as a daily-driver, and it will still
take time to replicate this upstream, although it is now clear that we
will surely get there. And as a mere prototype, it has a lot of
shortcuts that we would not have in an upstream version, even though
it can run on top of an unmodified (i.e., upstream) version of
Mesa.

That said, this prototype can serve as an experimental driver and
as a testbed for all the Rust abstraction work taking place
upstream. It will let us experiment with different design decisions
and gather data on what truly contributes to the project’s
objective.

There is also a video on
YouTube of the prototype in action.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted back in October for rewriting the kernel’s memory-mapped concurrency ID code for some nice performance wins looks like it will land for Linux 6.19. This is the code that prominent Intel engineer Thomas Gleixner found to yield up to an 18% improvement for the PostgreSQL database. My testing of this “mm/cid” code has also shown some nice performance wins too…

BPF allows programs uploaded from user space to be run, safely, within the
kernel. The io_uring subsystem, too, can be thought of as a way of loading
programs in the kernel, though the programs in question are mostly a
sequence of I/O-related system calls. It has sometimes seemed inevitable
that io_uring would, like many other parts of the kernel, gain BPF
capabilities as a way of providing more flexibility to user space. That
has not yet happened, but there are currently two patches sets under
consideration that take different approaches to the problem.

Immich 2.3, a self-hosted photo and video management platform, adds multilingual OCR models and introduces maintenance mode.

VKD3D 1.18 is now available for this Direct3D 12 implementation that is part of the upstream Wine project. The VKD3D 1.18 release also comes just ahead of next month’s feature freeze for the upcoming Wine 11.0 stable release…

I don’t like where Windows is going. Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable. Time to give it a shot.