Oliver Smith at Canonical who serves as the Product Manager for Ubuntu Desktop published a post on “charting a course for the future” of the Ubuntu desktop…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu Desktop “Charting A Course For The Future” With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Next Year

Since 2021 among other Snap’ing efforts for converting formerly Ubuntu DEB packages to Canonical’s Snap sandboxed app packaging format has been the CUPS print server. The plan was to replace the Debian-packaged CUPS with the Snap-based CUPS for Ubuntu 23.10 but now that is being pushed back to next year…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu Delays Transition To Snap’ed CUPS Print Server

It looks like the further-tuned AMD Inception / SRSO (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) mitigation code will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window…

Source: Phoronix – Further Cleaned-Up AMD Inception/SRSO Mitigation Code Ready Ahead Of Linux 6.6

Coreboot 4.21 is available this week as the newest tagged release for this open-source system BIOS/firmware solution. Coreboot 4.21 brings a number of new motherboard ports as well as various core improvements…

Source: Phoronix – Coreboot 4.21 Brings More System76 Laptops, Star Labs & MSI Z790-P Support

Miguel Ojeda who leads the “Rust for Linux” effort of integrating Rust programming language support into the Linux kernel has already submitted his pull request of planned feature updates for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 To Bring Another Rust Toolchain Upgrade

Libinput 1.24 is available today for this input handling library used by Linux systems both legacy X11/X.Org desktops and especially by modern Wayland compositors for unifying input handling in the open-source world…

Source: Phoronix – libinput 1.24 Brings Changes For Apple Touchpads, Drawing Tablets

The Vulkan 1.3.262 revision to this industry standard for high performance graphics and compute is now published. There is the usual assortment of minor changes/fixes plus four new extensions, which all happen to be new vendor extensions from Qualcomm…

Source: Phoronix – Vulkan 1.3.262 Rolls Out With Four New Extensions

Following AMD recently posting Linux graphics driver patches for enabling a GFX 11.5 graphics engine and new DCN 3.5 display block that are presumably for an RDNA3 refresh such as for the Ryzen 8000 series APUs, today AMD posted additional open-source driver patch series for enabling additional new IP…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Posts Linux Driver Patches For New VPE & UMSCH Components With Future GPUs

The Linux 6.5 kernel is expected to be released as stable this weekend barring any last minute issues from being raised. One of the notable changes with this new kernel version is Linux now defaulting to the AMD P-State “EPP” active driver configuration for modern Ryzen systems rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver default. In some cases this can mean better performance but particularly should yield a nice improvement to the power efficiency of Ryzen Zen 2 and newer platforms, especially laptops and other portable Linux systems like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. I am working on some fresh AMD Ryzen Linux laptop comparison benchmarks but for this article is a look at Linux 6.5 on the desktop side with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.

Source: Phoronix – Ryzen 9 7950X Performance With The New AMD P-State Default Of Linux 6.5

SQLite 3.43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source embedded SQL database library that is widely used by countless applications and other software for a variety of data storage purposes…

Source: Phoronix – SQLite 3.43 Released With Up To 2x Performance For JSON Processing

OpenMandriva developers today formally announced the release of their rolling-release OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Linux OS installation images, which are also being treated as a release candidate for the OMLx 5.0 non-rolling distribution variant. Making OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 more exciting is that they are now offering separate install media as well that features the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment in its current experimental state but is being offered by OpenMandriva as a “technical preview” around the future direction of the desktop…

Source: Phoronix – OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Brings KDE Plasma 6 TP Option, Continues With AMD Zen Spin

Fedora with their more liberal update policies will soon be rolling out the Thunderbird 115 mail client to stable Fedora Linux users…

Source: Phoronix – Thunderbird 115 Will Be Rolling Out To Fedora Users

Upstreamed into the Coreboot Git repository this week is the ability to run on the MSI PRO Z790-P DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards for enjoying a latest-generation Intel desktop motherboard that is readily available as an alternative to using the proprietary BIOS implementations…

Source: Phoronix – Coreboot Lands Support For The MSI PRO Z790-P Motherboards

Mesa’s Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code for Wayland has added the “IMMEDIATE” present mode option that uses Wayland’s tearing-control unstable extension to allow for images to be presented immediately but at the risk of visible screen tearing…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa’s Vulkan WSI/Wayland Code Adds “IMMEDIATE” Present Mode Support

KDE Gear 23.08 is available today as the four-month update to this collection of KDE desktop applications…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Gear 23.08 Released With Kalendar Becoming Merkuro, Many App Improvements

While AMD has acquired a number of hardware companies in the past several years, software company acquisitions by AMD has been much more rare. This morning AMD announced the acquisition of Mipsology as an AI software company…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Acquires An AI Software Company

Seemingly for Intel’s upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh processors, some new graphics PCI IDs were added today to Mesa for the Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Adds New Raptor Lake IDs To Mesa Graphics Drivers

With Ubuntu 23.10 shipping next month one of the changes expected on the desktop side was using a GIMP 3.0 snapshot for this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative rather than sticking to the aging GIMP 2.10 series. But now it’s been determined that this will not happen and GIMP 2.10 will continue to be used…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 23.10 Won’t Be Shipping A GIMP 3.0 Snapshot

In addition to AMD sending out DCN 3.5 display patches for that next-gen display IP block presumably for their upcoming Ryzen 8000 series APUs, Intel’s open-source engineers today sent out the patches enabling Lunar Lake display support for their i915 kernel driver while there is also support baking for their in-development Xe kernel driver…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Brings Up Lunar Lake Display Support For Linux

Last week AMD sent out initial patches for enabling the “GFX 11.5” graphics IP under Linux for this presumed RDNA3 refresh that is likely for their next-gen Ryzen 8000 series APUs. Today AMD open-source Linux driver engineers sent out DCN 3.5 patches as an updated version of their Display Core Next IP…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Sends Out Patches Enabling New “DCN 3.5” GPU Display Block