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The first quarter of 2025 is already drawing to a close... It seemed like Q1'2025 flew by but when looking back at all the Mesa 3D graphics driver activity, there was a heck of a lot accomplished in this area of the open-source landscape. Open-source Vulkan drivers continued advancing feverishly, Mesa code continues to be adapted to new platforms from Windows to Haiku OS, and all the big vendors continue being involved in open-source GPU drivers in one form or another...

While the upstream MIPS architecture is at a dead-end due to RISC-V, the Linux kernel code for the MIPS CPU architecture continues to improve for all the existing MIPS-based platforms out there. With Linux 6.15 there is new work for enhancing the Mobileye EyeQ6 SoC support...

Shotcut 25.03 is now available for this open-source and cross-platform video editor built atop the MLT Multimedia Framework...

With the first quarter quickly drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Intel Linux news of the quarter. There's been excitement with the Battlemage discrete graphics cards with their open-source driver, early work on Xe3 graphics, AVX10.2 dropping the optional 512-bit features to make it mandatory now (thankfully!), and a lot of exciting upstream Linux kernel improvements...

Samsung used to sell web cameras for their smart TVs for use with living room video chatting with the likes of Skype. Samsung no longer supports Skype on their TVs (goodbye Skype!) or these devices but if you happen to have one laying around or buy one used for cheap, it's now possible to use these Samsung TV cameras as a standard web camera under Linux...

All of the PCI subsystem feature updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. This includes some new drivers from AMD and Intel-Altera as well as various other PCI changes...

Earlier this month brought the Theora 1.2 beta release coming 16 years after Theora's libtheora 1.0 release for this video codec designed by Xiph.Org for use with Ogg audio. Theora is derived from the now rather ancient VP3 video codec, but for those continuing to enjoy content in Theora format, today brings the version 1.2 library...

Within This Week in Plasma, KDE developer Nate Graham notes the great excitement in KDE bug fixing this week/ KDE developers have lowered their HI/VHI priority bug counts down to "their lowest numbers ever numbers" in addition to working on new Plasma 6.4 features over the past few days...

The Debian release team announced that the Debian 13 "Trixie" transition and toolchain freeze began on-schedule this month...

The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he's unhappy with some new "hdrtest" testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the "turds" it leaves behind and this code "needs to die" at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers...

While fresh off the GNOME 48 release, GNOME desktop developers aren't slowing down and there's been some interesting activity to report this week...

The big pull request was sent out today of the numerous Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. There are new drivers, a lot as usual for the AMD Radeon and Intel kernel graphics drivers, and a lot of other changes throughout for advancing these open-source kernel graphics/display drivers...

While there were a few graphics benchmarks in yesterday's Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarks, today's article is looking more at the Ubuntu 25.04 Linux gaming performance for both the GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktops that default to the Wayland-based session by default while also trying out the X11 session for both of these desktops.

Back during the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle initial support for many (pre-M1) Apple devices were upstreamed including various iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. That though was the very preliminary support and continuing to work their way upstream are various drivers/patches to further enhance the support. Now for the Linux 6.15 kernel is a new Apple backlight driver for controlling the backlight on various mobile Apple devices...

The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets...

All of the ARM64 changes were merged this week to the Linux 6.15 kernel for enhancing the 64-bit ARM processor support...

Since last year Canonical had been investigating using -O3 compiler optimizations for their Ubuntu package builds in the name of delivering better performance for Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks back though they decided they would not use -O3 optimizations for all packages. They have now provided more engineering insight into their reasoning and the results of their investigation into -O3 compiler optimizations for more packages...

A two year old Intel Mesa merge request was finally merged for Mesa 25.1 today for enabling functionality on DG2/Alchemist GPUs and newer...

All of the HID subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window...

Set to be merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel is the very initial NOVA driver core code that will be incrementally built up over time in succeeding kernel versions. For Linux 6.15, this open-source NVIDIA kernel driver isn't of any use for end-users as it's just the very preliminary pieces to begin crafting the foundation for the driver that is leveraging the NVIDIA GSP found with Turing and newer hardware. In preparation for future kernel cycles, the NOVA skeleton driver pieces were posted for review yesterday to begin fleshing out more of the driver's design...