After being cancelled by Riot Games and revived as an indie game again, Hytale is now set for an Early Access launch in January 2026.

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Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault from Digital Sun and 11 bit studios should run a whole lot smoother for everyone now, and feel better on Valve's Steam Deck.

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This Black Friday is an in-depth look at the current performance of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver (the Nova driver not yet being ready for end-users) paired with the latest Mesa NVK driver for open-source Vulkan API support. With that NVK Vulkan driver is also looking at the OpenGL performance using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver used now for OpenGL on modern NVIDIA GPUs rather than maintaining the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Plus the Rusticl driver for OpenCL compute atop the NVK driver. This fully open-source and latest NVIDIA Linux driver support was compared to NVIDIA's official 580 series Linux driver. Both RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards were tested for this thorough GPU driver comparison.

In addition to the proposed Hierarchical Queued NUMA-aware spinlocks for better performance, another interesting performance-enhancing patch series posted in the past 24 hours for the Linux kernel is for improving the performance of single-threaded tasks running on high core count CPU desktops / workstations / servers...

The excellent and incredibly useful Linux performance overlay MangoHud has released version 0.8.2 after being in testing for a few weeks with new features.

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AnduinOS is an Ubuntu-based distribution which provides a GNOME desktop which has been themed and styled to resemble Windows 11. The project provides a smaller ISO file than its parent with each supported language split into a separate ISO. Snap support, which is included in Ubuntu, has been removed from AnduinOS.

We eagerly await to see if the AMD ISP4 driver will be ready for mainlining in the imminent Linux v6.19 merge window but it's getting down to the wire and thus looking less likely it will make it unless action is taken in the coming days. Today though a sixth version of this AMD ISP4 image signal processor driver was posted for this last piece of the puzzle in enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop as well as future Ryzen high-end laptops...

The NTFSPLUS Linux kernel driver as a modern NTFS file-system driver implementation continues quickly taking shape as it aims to become the most performant and feature-rich NTFS read/write driver for Linux systems...

Another interesting bundle of games here for you that you may want to pick up with some really nice stuff from Green Man Gaming.

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A Huawei engineer has sent out patches proposing HQspinlock as a Hierarchical Queued NUMA-aware spinlock for the Linux kernel. HQspinlock aims to addresss inefficiencies within the Linux kernel's spinlock on modern NUMA-systems due to frequent and costly cross-NUMA cache-line transfers...

EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. The project aims to be a spiritual successor to Antergos, providing an easy setup and a pre-configured desktop environment on an Arch base. EndeavourOS offers both off-line and on-line install options. The off-line installer, Calamares, uses the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The on-line installer can install optional software components, including most popular desktop environments.

On top of doing their own Black Friday sale, the indie store itch.io has its Creator Day today as well where they take no cut from developers.

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As the one and last friendly reminder, if you enjoy the daily and original content found on Phoronix.com but not liking ads and wanting to view multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and more: the 2025 Black Friday / Cyber Week deal is ending Monday to help support the site while enjoying a discounted rate...

Vulkan 1.4.335 released a few hours ago as the latest iteration of this high performance graphics and compute API. With being just a week since the prior update and given the US Thanksgiving week, it's on the lighter side in terms of issues addressed. There is one new extension though and it's a big one: VK_EXT_present_timing is finally merged...

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.

It's been two months since there were any notable Intel Linux engineering departures to note following various layoffs and voluntary departures this year that have unfortunately impacted their Linux/open-source talent. Sadly this US Thanksgiving is a new departure to note: one of Intel's maintainers for the Xe open-source Linux kernel graphics driver is leaving the company. This is for the modern Xe driver used by default since Lunar Lake and playing a pivotal role for Intel Linux graphics moving forward...

AV Linux is a versatile, Debian-based distribution featuring a large collection of audio and video production software. Additionally, it also includes a custom kernel with IRQ threading enabled for low-latency audio performance. AV Linux can be run directly from a live DVD or a live USB storage device, though it can also be installed on a hard disk and used as a general-purpose operating system for everyday tasks.

Parch GNU/Linux is an Arch-based, rolling-release Linux distribution for standard desktops as well as some ARM-based devices. Its goal is to provide a streamlined and user-friendly experience while maintaining the customisability and performance of Arch Linux. The distribution offers a choice of GNOME, KDE Plasma and Xfce desktops, the Calamares graphical installer, optimised Persian fonts for enhanced readability and aesthetics, and extensive documentation and community support.

The first Ubuntu 26.04 monthly snapshot is out, the first of 5 planned for the 'Resolute Raccoon' before next April's stable release. Fancy testing it? Details inside.

You're reading Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 1 is Available to Download, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Following up on the discussion from earlier this month among GCC developers over switching to C++20 by default for the GCC compiler as the default C++ standard when not otherwise set, that change has indeed happened. Merged now is the change defaulting to C++20 (well, the GNU++20 dialect) rather than C++17/GNU++17 when not otherwise specified when compiling C++ code...

In addition to Intel Arrow Lake desktop performance evolving nicely on Linux over the course of 2025, the Intel Arc B-Series graphics that launched last December with the Arc B580 have evolved quite nicely too with their open-source driver stack. With it coming up on one year since the Arc B580 launch, here is a look at how the GPU compute performance has evolved since that point. Similar Intel Arc B580 Linux graphics comparisons are also coming up in a follow-up comparison on Phoronix.

Where Winds Meet continues to be a big hit on Steam and it works quite well on Desktop Linux but it needs a lot of improvements on Valve's Steam Deck.

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SmartOS is an open-source UNIX-like operating system based on illumos, a community fork of OpenSolaris. It features four technologies - ZFS (a combined file system and logical volume manager), DTrace (a dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting kernel and application problems), Zones (a lightweight virtualisation solution), KVM and bhyve (two full virtualisation solutions for running a variety of guest operating systems, including Linux, Windows, BSD and Plan9). SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances.

Zlib-ng 2.3.1 is out today as the first stable release in the v2.3 series for this Zlib replacement that carries a variety of performance optimizations for speedier compression/decompression...