With this week’s release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer…

Source: Phoronix – Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues

One of the new features to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle is the merging of the experimental “Xe” Intel kernel graphics driver. This driver has been in development for quite a while but has reached the state now at which Intel is comfortable with developing it further while in the mainline kernel tree.

Source: Phoronix – Trying Out & Benchmarking The New Experimental Intel Xe Linux Graphics Driver

Here’s a pleasant Christmas present and one I certainly wasn’t expecting… Motherboard manufacturer ASRock has announced software for Linux! Well, not any motherboard management/configuration software for their desktop motherboards or anything like that but rather a Linux port of their AI QuickSet software that is intended to help users “experience AI in one click.”..

Source: Phoronix – ASRock Launches AI QuickSet Software For Linux

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has announced TUXEDO Control Center 2.1 as their newest update to this software for managing your notebook’s vitals from the Linux desktop…

Source: Phoronix – TUXEDO Computers Updates Its Linux Control Center Software

The latest bits of future Intel CPU hardware support being queued for the mainline kernel is adding Intel Idle driver support for the upcoming Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge processors…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.8 To Add Intel Idle Driver Support For Sierra Forest & Grand Ridge

One of the often overlooked pieces of the Linux desktop software stack is Plymouth that for the past 15 years or so has been providing a graphical boot splash screen that succeeded Red Hat’s former RHGB software or having no graphical boot splash screen at all on some Linux distributions. This week marked the first new release of Plymouth in nearly two years…

Source: Phoronix – Plymouth Boot Splash Screen Sees First Update In Nearly Two Years

For those with Intel Arc Graphics on Linux and wanting to enjoy the game Baldur’s Gate 3 thanks to the power of Valve’s Steam Play software, an important fix has been merged to Mesa 24.0-devel and set for back-porting to Mesa 23.3. This should take care of rendering issues being reported for Baldur’s Gate 3 with Intel graphics on Linux when using the Vulkan renderer…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Fixes Up Baldur’s Gate 3 On Linux With Arc Graphics

Following my Linux benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor performance where it ended up being rather disappointing but then with finding great success with the integrated Arc Graphics on Meteor Lake, like I you may be left wondering how much of a role Linux is playing with these results compared to Windows… Well, this article will shed some light on that aspect with looking at the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance on the Acer Swift Go 14 Meteor Lake laptop.

Source: Phoronix – Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On The Intel Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake

If you were hoping to spend your New Year’s Eve compiling a freshly-minted Linux 6.7 stable kernel, you’ll need to draft new plans as Linux 6.7 stable won’t be released until the following week…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Won’t Be Out For New Year’s Eve

The upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle will be adding mainline support for several low-cost ARM Linux handheld gaming consoles that are suitable for running retro games, older game emulators, and other lightweight software…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.8 To Add Support For Several Cheap ARM-Powered Handheld Game Consoles

Merged yesterday to the Git code for the PostgreSQL database server is support for facilitating incremental backups…

Source: Phoronix – PostgreSQL Lands Support For Incremental Backups

Ahead of the holidays the open-source developers working on the Godot game engine have released Godot 4.3 Dev 1 as their first test release to this next feature release…

Source: Phoronix – Godot 4.3 Dev 1 Released With Rendering System Refactor, D3D12

OpenSUSE is now providing builds of openSUSE Tumbleweed and microOS that are making use of systemd-boot as its bootloader rather than GRUB and also leveraging full disk encryption via systemd…

Source: Phoronix – openSUSE Tumbleweed Trying Out systemd-boot & systemd Full Disk Encryption

The Bcachefs file-system has landed some additional fixes ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.7 stable release…

Source: Phoronix – Bcachefs Lands More Fixes Ahead Of Linux 6.7 Stable Debut

Back in January I wrote about Intel working on a Timed I/O driver for Linux with PPS (Pulse Per Second) to help with time synchronization between multiple devices. There hasn’t been much external talk about this Timed I/O / PPS functionality while today as we approach the end of the year a new set of Linux kernel patches were posted for wiring up this Intel PPS Generator functionality…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Revises Work On Timed I/O PPS Functionality For Linux

Among the newly-proposed features for Fedora 40 is enabling WiFi MAC address randomization by default to yield better user privacy…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora 40 Looks To Utilize WiFi MAC Address Randomization For Better Privacy

Intel’s new Xe kernel graphics driver is set for merging into Linux 6.8 as an experimental option. While it’s being added to the next kernel cycle, it’s not yet used by default for any existing Intel GPUs and its features have yet to be fully implemented and the performance has yet to be fully optimized. Among the features currently missing is Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support but a patch series posted today aims to address that functionality…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Posts SVM Patches For Xe Kernel Graphics Driver

With AI being all the rage these days and each vendor working on getting their wares to market with AI acceleration, besides Intel now having out their Meteor Lake CPUs that feature their Intel AI Boost (NPU), Intel is rather positioned well with their prolific open-source software contributions. One of the AI-related software contributions over the past week has been improvements to the FFmpeg multimedia library’s “DNN detect” filter for object detection within videos…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Improves FFmpeg’s DNN Detect Filter For AI Object Detection

GRUB 2.06 was released back in June of 2021 and today it’s finally been succeeded by… GRUB 2.12. This latest GRUB stable release has been a long time coming but it’s finally out before the new year and it’s packing many features for this widely-used open-source bootloader…

Source: Phoronix – GRUB 2.12 Bootloader Brings SDL2 Support, Boot Loader Interface

For those with some extra time on your hands around the holidays, the second beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop along with KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6.0 is now available for testing…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6 Beta 2 Released For Testing