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LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 is out today with the official release of this updated open-source office suite coming in just about two weeks...

Linux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out. As a workaround, Fedora 42 is looking to use the generic "SimpleDRM" driver during this initial boot splash screen experience to initially avoid the bulky DRM drivers...

Due to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he's preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems...

Last month when Intel formally introduced Battlemage graphics their initial products in the B-Series were the B570 and B580 graphics cards. The B580 went on sale in December and we've been busy testing the B580 on Linux since while today the embargo expires on the Arc B570 with those graphics cards going on sale this morning. Here is a first look at the Intel Arc B570 graphics and compute performance under Linux with their latest open-source drivers.

As a follow-up to the article about Ubuntu 25.04 preparing for GIMP 3.0 in its repositories, this past week finally brought the GIMP 3.0 release candidate into the Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" repository...

The Intel Arc Graphics B570 graphics card isn't hitting retailers until January and the review embargo doesn't expire until then, but fair game now are pictures/video of the Arc B570 hardware... The ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics B570 arrived today for Linux testing at Phoronix in the coming weeks for this second Battlemage graphics card...

Four years ago already the Raspberry Pi 400 was announced as a Raspberry Pi keyboard computer built around the Raspberry Pi 4, passively-cooled, and all packaged up nicely in a keyboard form factor. Announced earlier this month was the Raspberry Pi 500 as the successor and now built around the Raspberry Pi 5. For $90 USD this keyboard computer is a very versatile and convenient compact Linux PC.

The patch series in the works for a while to provide the necessary kernel abstractions for the Rust programming language to actually implement real device drivers looks like it will finally premiere in the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

It's been a few months since hearing anything new out of Serpent OS, the original Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty, who started Solus Linux and also was involved with Intel's Clear Linux. As a Christmas surprise, Serpent OS has now reached the alpha stage of development...

Eric Biggers of Google who has pursued countless CPU optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto subsystem over the years has some noteworthy optimizations coming for AMD processors with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

Intel engineers are working on contributing upstream support to the GNU Debugger (GDB) for debugging software running on Intel GPUs...

Linux 6.13 cleared out more than 100k lines of old and unmaintained code while that end of year code cleaning isn't stopping... With Linux 6.14 at least another old and seemingly useless driver is being gutted from the input subsystem: evbug...

AMD has squeezed in one more open-source Vulkan driver update for the year to benefit Linux gamers and others wanting to use this official AMD Vulkan Linux driver option...

This past week Intel published an Intel Core Ultra 200S Series "Arrow Lake" performance status update following mixed reviews since launch around the Arrow Lake gaming performance that were inconsistent with Intel's internal findings. Among Intel's findings detailed in their report this past week were some new BIOS performance optimizations, some misconfigured performance settings in early/reviewer BIOSes, and also some Windows 11 updates being pushed down to help with different performance issues. ASUS already started releasing new BIOSes that incorporate the 0x114 Arrow Lake intended to help the situation. While it's been a Windows-focused issue, I couldn't help but to run Intel Arrow Lake performance comparison benchmarks on Linux with the new microcode / BIOS.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.13-rc4 kernel as the newest weekly test release leading up to Linux 6.13 stable by mid to late January...

OpenShot 3.3 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular open-source video editor. This Qt-based cross-platform non-linear video editor has a new default theme and many other enhancements in time for editing any of your year-end or holiday videos...

Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited... Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice performance benefits...

Intel processors have long identified in the Family 6 series going back to the 1990s but over the past number of months Intel engineers have been adapting the Linux kernel to prepare for a post Family 6 Intel CPU era for the model/family CPU identification handling. Patches posted in September introduced Diamond Rapids support as the first Intel Family 19 CPU while new patches for the Linux kernel are indicating Intel will be using both Family 18 and Family 19 identification for future processor models...

Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year's LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework...