Last week's Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering "SER" is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance...

For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer...

Aurora is a Fedora Silverblue-based Linux distribution with the goal of being a general-purpose workstation. It uses the KDE Plasma desktop. Like Fedora Silverblue, Aurora's root filesystem is immutable (read-only), which makes the system more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop. Updates, upgrades and rollbacks to a previous image are available via the rpm-ostree utility. The distribution also features Flatpak applications and Toolbox containers.

ChromeOS Flex, developed by Google, is a free and lightweight Linux distribution based on Gentoo-derived ChromeOS. Unlike ChromeOS which is designed specifically for Chromebook computers, ChromeOS Flex can be installed on most x86_64 devices with a AMD or Intel processors, offering a Chromebook-like experience. The product's functionality can be further extended by installing a Debian-based Linux subsystem with a complete Linux development environment. ChromeOS Flex is available as a BIN image that can be transferred to a bootable USB Flash drive; it can be used in a "live" mode or it can be permanently installed to a computer's hard disk.

The Xubuntu team has shared details on last month’s worrying website hijack, pinpointing how the attack happened and the steps its taking to prevent a repeat in the future. As detailed in our coverage back in October, the official Xubuntu download page began serving a malicious .zip file to users attempting to download the official torrent between October 15 and 19. Though the incident was resolved quickly once detected, questions were raised about how it could’ve happened in the first place, and whether any one had been affected. Today, the Xubuntu team, based on information Canonical has shared with it, has answers. […]

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BlueOnyx is a server distribution based on AlmaLinux OS. It is the mission of BlueOnyx to provide a fully-integrated Internet hosting platform that includes web, e-mail, DNS and file transfer services from a simple, user-friendly web-based interface that is easily installed on commodity hardware or virtual private server.

Calculate Linux is a Gentoo-based family of three distinguished distributions. Calculate Directory Server (CDS) is a solution that supports Windows and Linux clients via LDAP + SAMBA, providing proxy, mail and Jabbers servers with streamlined user management. Calculate Linux Desktop (CLD) is a workstation and client distribution (with a choice of Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE or Xfce desktops) that includes a wizard to configure a connection to Calculate Directory Server. Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) is a live CD with a build framework for creating a custom distribution.

A release candidate of the upcoming GIMP 3.2 release is now available for download and testing. GIMP 3.2 will be next major release of the free, open-source raster image editor, arriving a mere 8 months after the huge 3.0 milestone as a result of a new accelerated release schedule. Though not stable, GIMP development builds provide avid users and developers with the opportunity to test new features and provide feedback on how things are progressive. Below, I run-through what’s new in this GIMP 3.2 release candidate specifically. The GIMP 3.1.2 & 3.1.4 development builds also added plenty of new features. If you haven’t […]

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Intel's LASS functionality was queued today into tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch. With LASS now making it into a TIP branch, it looks like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds...

extrox is a spin of MX Linux by a member of the MX Linux development team, featuring custom art and theme, careful application selection, various user-friendly improvements, and an audio filter (developed in-house) for enhanced sound quality in music playback and streaming. The distribution uses the Xfce desktop with the Compiz compositing window manager.

Creator of the popular free and open source video game library manager Playnite has a positive update on a Linux version, with plans for it during 2026.

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Guild Wars Reforged was announced today by ArenaNet to arrive on December 3, and it will be Steam Deck Verified and optimised for Valve's handheld.

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The Game Awards returns for another popularity contest, and they've revealed the nominees for the 2025 event that we've listed here for you.

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It's the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package...

MiniOS is a Debian-based Linux distribution which strives to be lightweight, modular, versatile and customisable. It comes in three editions, "Standard", "Toolbox" and "Ultra". MiniOS "Standard" is a compact system designed for everyday computing tasks, while "Toolbox" is designed for maintenance, diagnostics and recovery of computer systems; it provides a rich set of graphical and console tools for working with disks and partitions, network diagnostics and administration, data security, data and password recovery, hardware fault diagnosis and testing, as well as other utilities. Finally, the "Ultra" variant of MiniOS provides an extensive set of software tools designed both for maintenance and diagnostics of computer systems and for solving a wide range of general office tasks.

In the past we have seen Llama.cpp with Vulkan outperforming AMD's ROCm compute stack in some of the large language model (LLM) AI benchmarks. Curious if anything has changed given the recent ROCm 7.1 release, I ran some benchmarks of an up-to-date Llama.cpp using the AMD ROCm back-end compared to the Vulkan back-end with the latest RADV driver. For this round of testing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card was used.

In addition to the RADV driver status update shared recently in Vienna at XDC2025, there was also a presentation on the current status of the NVK driver as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa that currently targets the Nouveau kernel driver and the Rust-based Nova kernel driver in the future...

Qualcomm upstreamed new Cloud AI 100 "AIC100" firmware today to linux-firmware.git to fix a rather significant power/performance issue for these AI accelerators...

For anyone interested in the ongoing saga of Hytale, the good news is that the game has been saved, with Hytale Studios acquiring it from Riot Games.

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Where Winds Meet is a new free to play game on Steam that's doing some big numbers right now, and thankfully it seems to work great on Linux with Proton.

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A proposal has been raised by two CPython core developers to introduce the Rust programming language to CPython. Initially the focus is on allowing Rust to be used for developing optional extension modules for CPython but ultimately their goal is for Rust to become a hard dependency of CPython and used throughout its codebase...

SUSE developers working on their modern Agama operating system installer used by SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 and openSUSE is out with a new release. With Agama 18 they have officially dropped support for 32-bit / i586 processors...

In addition to talking about the Valve-backed open-source driver work for old AMD Radeon GPUs, Timur Kristóf also presented at the XDC2025 conference on the state of the RADV Vulkan driver. Timur was joined by Daniel Schürmann to talk about the great Linux gaming experience now possible on the RADV driver with the work done by Valve, AMD, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community. RADV ray-tracing is much better today than in the past, the ACO compiler back-end has turned out very well, and RADV is all-around a great example of an open-source Vulkan API driver...

OpenE2140 is bringing back Earth 2140, the classic RTS with it being powered by the OpenRA engine and a first release is out now.

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