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Last week I posted some initial GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop gaming benchmarks on Ubuntu 25.04 beta for looking at the performance of those two leading desktop options for this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release. Both GNOME and KDE under Wayland were outperforming KDE on X11 (and GNOME on X11 wasn't even working due to bugs). Some Phoronix readers questioned though whether the Wayland advantage on GNOME/KDE was due to those desktops losing focus on X11 support or if they are just too bloated. So for adding some additional context, here are some graphics/gaming benchmarks on the same system hardware/software when adding in the Xfce 4.20 and LXQt 2.1 X11 desktops.

This morning's Intel TDX update reminded me that I still hadn't gotten around to digging into the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. Here is a look at the KVM changes this cycle that continue to be particularly heavy on Intel and AMD virtualization improvements...

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for providing hardware-backed isolation and confidential computing support for virtual machines (VMs) on modern Xeon processors is about to become more reliable and potentially faster for some workloads...

Qt 6.9 was just released as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform graphics toolkit...

KDE Plasma 6.3.4 shipped this morning as the newest monthly point release for the Plasma 6.3 desktop...

Intel's original DG1 discrete GPU was principally a development vehicle on the path to DG2/Alchemist. It did appear with the Iris Xe Max laptop dGPU in very few configurations but surprisingly it's taken until now where the Intel Linux graphics driver is set to remove the experimental "force_probe" flag on these pre-Alchemist discrete GPUs...

Merged last week for the Linux 6.15 merge window were a big set of scheduler updates...

The Steam Survey results for February showed a 0.61% drop for Linux gaming marketshare following a 20.8% increase to the Chinese use, which was yet another month of such wild swings attributed to a large influx in Simplified Chinese survey respondents. The March results for Steam Survey were published this evening and show the Linux marketshare more than recovering now that the English survey results have shot back up...

There were 281 original news articles on Phoronix during the month of March along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured-length articles and benchmarks. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux and open-source content over the past month, in case you missed any of the interesting hardware launches, open-source software milestones, kernel changes, and other milestones...

While Fedora 42 isn't being released until later in the month, already a number of new features for Fedora 43 have been granted approval by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

All of the FUSE updates have been sent in for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel for supporting file-systems in user-space...

No, it's not at all an April Fools' Joke or anything along those lines... An Intel open-source engineer just posted the patch series entitled "hide the disgusting turds" for the Linux kernel...

For those interested in the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, there's another option to consider for Linux use soon with pending patches: the ASUS Zenbook A14...

Merged today for the Mesa 25.1-devel graphics driver code and also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.0 OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is another new Intel Battlemage device ID...

As part of the various areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, on Sunday he sent out the driver core updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel. The driver core changes this cycle aren't too notable except for revising the Rust bindings now that more developers are attempting to use them...

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel last week was the big set of hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates with new hardware support as well as a few new sensor drivers...

As the last planned article of the quarter, here is a look back at the most popular Phoronix content from Q1'2025 with 822 original news articles and 40 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews written by your's truly. There were interesting hardware launches from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA this quarter along with a never-ending pace of new open-source software innovations and the unfortunate ongoing drama within the free software community...

While the first quarter is coming to an end, there has already been immense progress this year to the Wayland protocols and compositors along with associated Linux desktop software for embracing this alternative to legacy X11/X.Org. From HDR color management seeing much adoption this quarter to Wine Wayland becoming more viable and the large number of Wayland compositors maturing, it was a pretty incredible quarter...

The perf tools changes were merged today for the Linux 6.15 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the wonderful perf tooling is introducing the notion of latency profiling by leveraging kernel scheduler information. This latency data will be further useful for Linux software engineers working to optimize system latency/performance...

The wlroots library used by the Sway compositor and other Wayland compositors has merged support for the color-management-v1 protocol that is notable for enabling High Dynamic Range (HDR) display use under Linux...