Linux Mint 21.3 beta is now available for testing as this latest Ubuntu-based, desktop-focused Linux distribution…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Mint 21.3 Beta Released With Cinnamon 6.0 Desktop

Due to a problematic patch back-ported from Linux 6.5 causing interference between EXT4 and iomap code, there’s the possibility of a data corruption bug on older kernels — most notably recent Linux 6.1 LTS point releases that can currently be found in the likes of Debian 12…

Source: Phoronix – Debian 12.3 Delayed Due To An EXT4 Data Corruption Bug Being Addressed

Lubuntu as the Ubuntu Linux spin featuring the lightweight LXQt desktop has shared some of their plans for the upcoming Lubuntu 24.04 LTS release. As part of this release due out in April they are aiming to have an optional Wayland session in place although they don’t expect to make it the default until Lubuntu 24.10…

Source: Phoronix – Lubuntu 24.04 LTS Aiming For Optional Wayland Session, Default in 24.10

Released last month was OBS Studio 30 with Intel QSV AV1 acceleration on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, YouTube Live Control Room Panel support, and a variety of other features for this software popular with game streamers and live-casting. Out today is OBS Studio 30.0.1 with some crash fixes and other refinements for last month’s update…

Source: Phoronix – OBS Studio 30.0.1 Released With Crash Fixes

Earlier Phoronix reporting on the “Valve Galileo” as a new Steam Deck device proved accurate and that is the new Steam Deck OLED gaming console. Further improving the upstream Linux kernel support is a set of patches to further refine the Sound Open Firmware (SOF) support for this new platform…

Source: Phoronix – Improved Sound Open Firmware On The Way For Valve’s Steam Deck OLED

Following last week’s initial set of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 6.8, another weekly pull request was submitted on Friday to DRM-Next of further changes…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Lands More Graphics Updates For Linux 6.8: More MI300 & RDNA3 Refresh Work

In addition to Intel preparing to merge their new Xe kernel graphics driver into the mainline kernel potentially for Linux 6.8, their existing open-source Intel kernel graphics driver code continues to be improved upon and receiving new features…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Graphics With Linux 6.8 To Add FDINFO Memory Stats, More Meteor Lake Workarounds

With the recent €1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers remain quite busy working on improving the accessibility and security of the GNOME desktop…

Source: Phoronix – GNOME Developers Working On USB Portal Integration, Updated Phosh

It’s a Christmas season of bug fixing in the KDE world as following the late November Plasma 6.0 Beta 1 they’ve shifted from feature work to fixes and with the new test release has received an influx of bug reports…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Developers Continue On Bug Fixing Spree Ahead Of Plasma 6.0

Last year W4 Games was formed by Godot game engine developers as part of an effort to strengthen the open-source Godot ecosystem as well as work on commercial products and services, such as integrating with the proprietary game console/cloud platforms. They started out with $8.5 million dollars last year while this week announced a series A funding round of $15M…

Source: Phoronix – W4 Games Raises M To Help Push Open-Source Video Game Development With Godot

The release process has begun for releasing Wine 9.0 as stable early next year…

Source: Phoronix – Wine 9.0-rc1 Released With Upgraded VKD3D, Wine Wayland Improvements

Vulkan 1.3.273 was released today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API…

Source: Phoronix – Vulkan 1.3.273 Released With KHR Calibrated Timestamps Extension

Intel engineers maintain multiple Ethernet drivers in the Linux kernel for their wide-range of networking hardware from consumer to high-end data center wares. There’s been an ongoing effort to overhaul their Ethernet driver management to reduce code duplication between the different drivers for better code sharing and with an end goal of more unification…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Striving To Overhaul Their Multiple Ethernet Linux Drivers: “The Great Code Dedup”

AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) are intended to help provide better security for virtual machines and are key elements to both companies investments around confidential computing. It turns out they have a common enemy in their VM security goals: x86 32-bit software…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Dealing With x86 32-bit Software Security Issue For Intel TDX & AMD SEV

It looks like GNOME 46 might finally see the dynamic triple buffering support merged for Mutter to enhance the performance particularly for systems with integrated graphics…

Source: Phoronix – GNOME’s Dynamic Triple Buffering “Ready To Merge”

Canonical’s Multipass software that is advertised as “cloud-style VMs at your fingertips” and making it easy to spin-up “Ubuntu VMs on demand for any workstation”, is out with a new test release adding snapshots support and other new features…

Source: Phoronix – Canonical Releases Multipass 1.13 RC With Snapshots Support, Migrated To Qt6

PoCL 5.0-RC1 is out today as the newest feature release being brewed for this “Portable Computing Language” implementation that allows for OpenCL code to run on CPUs as well as running OpenCL code on other back-ends such as atop NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm and other LLVM back-ends…

Source: Phoronix – PoCL 5.0-RC1 Released With Experimental OpenCL For Networked Systems

Friday’s release of Wine 8.22 is expected to be the last bi-weekly feature release before shifting focus to the code freeze and making Wine 9.0 ready for release in early 2024. It’s coming down to the finish line how much more Wine Wayland driver functionality will be merged in time…

Source: Phoronix – Wine Wayland Driver Lands Mouselook Support, Relative Cursor Motion

It looks like Intel will soon be submitting their first Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver pull request to DRM-Next for mainlining this modern, current and future hardware focused kernel graphics driver to be added to the mainline Linux kernel. It looks like this mainlining is set to still happen in time for the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Will Submit New Xe Kernel Graphics Driver Soon – Likely For Linux 6.8