Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

After Steam on Linux usage topped to nearly 2% in July with the phenomenal success of the Steam Deck and with greater marketshare than Apple macOS, in August it took a dip and now the September numbers are out and points to a second consecutive month of the Linux percentage receding.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.6-rc4 as the newest test release for this kernel that is looking to be released as stable around the end of October.

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers.

Prolific RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve's Linux graphics driver team has re-enabled Delta Color Compression (DCC) with mipmaps for AMD GFX11 (RDNA3) hardware for the Mesa 23.3 release.

Microsoft released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230924 this week as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution. The driving force behind this release is to get out rebuilt AArch64 packages following the recent GCC security vulnerability that affected Arm 64-bit built software.

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired a longtime contributor to this "open-source Windows" project to spend the next five months working on the ReactOS GUI setup mode as an alternative to their classic text-based setup mode.

Disclosed back in August was the Inception vulnerability affecting all Zen processors. It took until today though for the mainline Linux kernel to mitigate Hygon processors for this vulnerability for those Zen 1 CPUs formed from the AMD-Chinese joint venture.

The xf86-video-siliconmotion X.Org driver has seen its first new release in six years for supporting the Silicon Motion Lynx and Cougar chipsets found in vintage laptops.

During the third quarter on Phoronix were 689 original Linux/open-source news articles and another 50 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles. Here's a look back at what excited Linux enthusiasts this quarter.

Stemming from reports of several fake crypto apps appearing in Canonical's Snap Store that aimed to steal user funds, temporary restrictions have been put in place while Canonical investigates the security matter.

Patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list in an effort to mainline support for the Milk-V Duo RISC-V development platform with the basic board retailing for $9.

Building off yesterday's Wine 8.17 release, Wine-Staging 8.17 is now available that consists of 494 extra patches atop the upstream Wine code-base.

The wlroots Wayland compositor library used by Sway and other Wayland compositors to help with the heavy lifting has merged support for the tearing control protocol.

Plasma 6 development is ending September on a high note with a number of new features and enhancements to this desktop now merged.

Google on Friday released libvpx 1.13.1 as the newest update to this open-source reference encoder for the VP8 and VP9 video codecs. This release is coming due to CVE-2023-5217, which is a "high" severity vulnerability that's been exploited within at least the Google Chrome web browser.

Wine 8.17 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux as well as serving as the basis for Valve's Proton that powers Steam Play.

With today's release of kmod 31, Linux's modprobe utility for loading kernel modules can finally allow arbitrary paths to allow loading new kernel modules from anywhere on the file-system.

Intel's Linux graphics driver engineers have begun submitting their feature changes to DRM-Next of new i915 kernel driver feature material they are preparing for the Linux 6.7 cycle this winter.

With the Intel Arrow Lake NPU being very similar to Meteor Lake for this neural processing unit, the patches enabling that NPU for next-gen Intel Core CPUs was submitted as a "fix" for the ongoing Linux 6.6 cycle.

AMD announced today that the Windows games Immortals of Aveum and Forspoken are available today with their FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) upscaling technology. More games making use of FSR 3 are on the way and the open-source code drop of FSR 3 is coming at a later date.

After a month and a half delay from AMDVLK 2023.Q3.1 to AMDVLK 2023.Q3.2, the AMDVLK 2023.Q3.3 driver is out today after just one week. This AMD Vulkan driver update finally enables Radeon RX 7700 / RX 7800 series support and delivers on other improvements.

For those using the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux distribution, there is now experimental support for booting it using systemd-boot.

Sound Open Firmware 2.7 released overnight and adds AMD Van Gogh platform support, presumably to be used by the Valve Steam Deck or some future refresh of the device or related platform like for VR hardware.

After being delayed by many weeks, Mesa 23.2 has been released as the quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used by AMD Radeon, Intel graphics, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno), Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA), Broadcom / Raspberry Pi, Arm Mali and other hardware.

In addition to Mesa 23.3-devel today seeing Intel Vulkan sparse support finally land, another notable merge request that landed is beginning to plumb in pipeline caching support for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver.

While OpenZFS 2.2 is nearing release, OpenZFS 2.1.13 was released on Wednesday as the latest stable point release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

In addition to KDE Plasma 6.0, another exciting desktop milestone we can look forward to in 2024 is the COSMIC desktop from System76 when they end up releasing the next Pop!_OS based upon Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The Pop!_OS / COSMIC developers continue making great progress on their Rust-written desktop environment.

Intel engineers have merged to Mesa 23.3 the initial open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver support for sparse resources! This is the important feature needed for running a number of newer Direct3D 12 games with Steam Play (Proton) via VKD3D-Proton with Intel graphics hardware.

Following the Counter-Strike 2 limited test since March, Counter-Strike 2 is now officially released and there is also a SteamOS/Linux build now available.

CodeWeavers -- in addition to contributing significantly to upstream Wine and being involved with Valve on Proton for Steam Play -- continues to offer CrossOver as a premium Wine-based software solution for enjoying Windows games and applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe products on Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS. Out today is CrossOver 23.5 as the latest evolution of this Wine-based commercial software.

The Servo browser engine has been seeing renewed development activity and interest since it was transferred to the Linux Foundation Europe and has attracted contributions from the likes of the Igalia consulting firm. Last week at the Open Source Summit Europe, an update on Servo was presented.

Ahead of the planned stable release in October, the openSUSE Leap Micro 5.5 Beta was published today for this lightweight Linux operating system built for containers and virtualized workloads.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 6 has been released as the latest version of this Linux Mint derivative that is based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu.

Earlier this month I noted that Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers had begun working on the OpenGL and Vulkan Mesa driver support for Xe 2 graphics as to be found with Lunar Lake "LNL" processors. Since then the initial hardware enablement work has only continued heating up.

Version 0.8 of uvg266 as one of the leading Versatile Video Codec (VVC) / H.266 open-source video encoders is now available.