Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon...

Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January...

Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD...

Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature...

KDE Plasma developers remain quite busy preparing for the Plasma 6.6 desktop release coming up in a little more than two weeks while at the same time continuing to land early features for the Plasma 6.7 release coming later in the year...

For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired...

GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings...

iDeal is an MX Linux-based distribution, with various privacy and security settings enabled by default. Privacy and security are the main stated goal of the project, offering to surf, shop, trade and bank online with peace of mind, without advertisements, tracking, logging, bugs, viruses or unwanted disclosure of personal information. iDeal OS was formerly available in two editions, "Emerald" and "Diamond", but these were merged into a single product in 2026, with the extra features of the "Diamond" edition now only available to users who contribute financially to the project.

Flora Linux-libre is a Linux distribution that uses the Linux-libre kernel, a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. It also excludes any non-free firmware. The project rebuilds Debian's "Stable" and some other Debian derivatives, such as MX Linux, and creates a "libre" flavour of those distributions with either MATE or Xfce desktop. Flora Linux-libre also comes with snapshot tools and installers that enable easy remastering of the distribution, as well as uim (short for universal input method), a multilingual input method framework.

The third Ubuntu 26.04 snapshot is out, giving you an easy way to test the 'Resolute Raccoon' ahead of its stable release in April. Details and links inside.

You're reading Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 3 is available to download, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments...

Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April...

Windows 11 remains too rigid for many, leading a Microsoft designer to propose a Linux-style dock via PowerToys to plug the gaps in Windows' customisation.

You're reading Microsoft designer proposes a Linux-style dock for Windows, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

AUSTRUMI (Austrum Latvijas Linukss) is a bootable live Linux distribution based on Slackware Linux. It requires limited system resources and can run on any Intel-compatible system with a CD-ROM installed. The entire operating system and all of the applications run from RAM, making AUSTRUMI a fast system and allowing the boot medium to be removed after the operating system starts.

Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn't always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won't be officially out quite in time for the initial ISO release...

The GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry report is out with "over 2,300" professionals in the industry surveyed, and here's some of the highlights from it.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Similar to what has been available on Intel and AMD processors for users with the shadow stack for control-flow integrity, Linux on RISC-V is finally ready to roll-out its user-space control-flow integrity support...

Following last week's Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension...

Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several months. Since then I have ratcheted up the benchmarks with nearly 500 benchmarks between the AMD EPYC 9755 and Intel Xeon 6980P processors for an even more comprehensive look at these CPUs atop Linux 6.18 LTS.

The Open Gaming Collective (OGC) was an interesting announcement recently from a few bigger names, but the CachyOS team opted out of it and now we know why.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

AerynOS is an independently-developed, rolling-release Linux distribution designed for general desktop use. Its main features include the GNOME desktop, a custom package manager called "moss", atomic updates with rollback options, a package build system called "boulder", and smart boot management with complex EFI configuration through a utility called "blsforme".

In the continuing saga of GPD versus Bazzite Linux, the GPD team have now posted their own statement on what happened.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Linux Lite is a beginner-friendly Linux distribution based on Ubuntu's long-term support (LTS) release and featuring the Xfce desktop. Linux Lite primarily targets Windows users. It aims to provide a complete set of applications to assist users with their everyday computing needs, including a full office suite, media players and other essential daily software.

ZimaOS is an independently-developed, Linux-based operating system for personal servers and network-attached storage (NAS) devices. It features system-level support for remote access, RAID configuration, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and a browser-based user interface for managing the server. It is developed in China by IceWhale Technology Limited, which also produces and sells specialist storage hardware devices called "ZimaCube". Besides ZimaOS which is a complete, standalone operating system, the company also produces CasaOS, a lightweight software layer that can be installed on top of an existing Linux installation in order to turn it into a personal server or a NAS.