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With this week's release of SVT-AV1 2.3 for open-source AV1 encoding citing significant performance improvements for running on ARM, I was eager to see how well this AV1 encoder would be performing on the new System76 Thelio Astra ARM developer desktop powered by Ampere Altra. Here are some benchmarks showing those big speed-ups for ARM-based AV1 encoding...

Alyssa Rosenzweig has pushed the latest Apple Silicon OpenGL "AGX Gallium3D" and Vulkan "Honeykrisp" code from the Asahi Linux development repository into the Mesa Git codebase ahead of this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release...

While the mainline Linux kernel has begun seeing initial support for various Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops, various feature limitations are outstanding before these Qualcomm-powered laptops really become usable for daily use. For instance, just a few days ago the audio firmware was finally upstreamed to make setting up X1 Elite laptops easier. Another important feature as an example is CPUFreq driver support for CPU frequency scaling to ensure optimal performance and power efficiency...

FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 1 is out today as the first tagged test snapshot in working toward this newest FreeBSD 14 point release...

Cloudflare's Pingora Rust framework that was written as a replacement to Nginx and made publicly open-source earlier this year with a focus on building fast and reliable networked systems is out with its newest feature release...

Sculpt OS for what has been working to become a general purpose operating system built off the original Genode is out with a new feature release...

Intel has integrated VVC VA-API hardware accelerated decoding support into the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary of interesting KDE changes in closing out October...

Vulkan 1.3.301 was published on Friday with the lone new extension this release being a rare contribution from Huawei adding HDR Vivid support with VK_HUAWEI_hdr_vivid...

Right on schedule for releasing the Xfce 4.20 desktop in December, the "Pre1" pre-release was posted on Friday for testing...

Earlier this year and through July Steam on Linux was enjoying above a 2% marketshare thanks to the success of the Arch Linux powered SteamOS and Steam Deck offerings. But then for August and September Steam on Linux use was below 2%. After a 0.13% rise in October, Steam on Linux is back to sitting at a 2.00% marketshare...

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for releasing Wine 10.0 around mid-January as the annual stable release for this open-source software to run Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

One of the very convenient features for Ubuntu Linux users who want to run the very newest upstream kernel releases or simply test a new kernel build for verifying bug fixes or functionality has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. It's been around for years, backed by Canonical, and very convenient for fetching pre-built AArch64 / ARM / POWER / RISC-V / x86_64 kernel binaries as Debian packages... With options of stable/test kernel versions as well as daily packages. Sadly, it's been broken once again and has been in that manner since mid-September...

With the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release there is a huge improvement coming for those using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 sample app...

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for linux_drm_syncobj_v1 as the modern Wayland protocol for explicit buffer synchronization...

Intel software engineers have been very busy recently with upstreaming various elements of support into the Linux kernel, open-source compilers and more for the next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors. Following the recent GCC prep patches for Diamond Rapids to work on the ISA additions around AMX-AVX512, AMX-FP8, AMX-FP32, and others, a new patch was posted today for actually exposing the "-march=diamondrapids" compiler target and in turn confirming all of the new ISA capabilities...

October is now in the books after writing 247 original news articles and another 24 Linux hardware reviews / featured multi-page benchmark articles. From the launches of Intel Arrow Lake and AMD EPYC 9005 to other interesting new hardware, the Russian Linux kernel drama, Linux 6.12 developments and early Linux 6.13 patches queuing in "-next" branches, October was an interesting month both for hardware and open-source software...

Ubuntu developer Simon Quigley laid out the plans for hoping Ubuntu packages will move from Qt 5 to Qt 6 so that by the time of the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle in early 2026 that the older version of this graphical toolkit can be removed...

Miriway 24.10 was released on Halloween as the newest version of this Mir-based Wayland compositor. Miriway is developed by Canonical/Ubuntu developers as a compositor for other desktops like Xfce, MATE, LXQt and others as a way to ease their migration path to Wayland...

As part of the latest Bcachefs fixes pull request, lead developer Kent Overstreet has provided an update on the bug situation for this advanced copy-on-write open-source file-system...