The Most Popular Linux News Over The Past 20 Years

With yesterday marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, I was curious what the most popular news articles were over these past two decades. There's a lot of compiler fodder, news from the early days of AMD Ryzen, Linus Torvalds commentary, and more.

With the 20th birthday of Phoronix, below is a look at the 20 most popular news articles on Phoronix since its inception. There have been 43,800 original news articles on Phoronix since its start. That's also not counting the more than five thousand Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. In this piece we're just looking at the most popular news items while a separate listing for the most popular Linux hardware reviews will come later this week.

As a reminder, if you are interested in supporting the site on this special occasion and helping stem the losses from ad-block users, this week there is a special Phoronix Premium deal. Phoronix Premium allows you to view the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. Through the end of the week you can go premium at a discounted rate to help support operations. Thanks for your support over the past 20 years.

Now here's the rather interesting list of the most popular news over the past 20 years:

Eric S. Raymond Calls LLVM The "Superior Compiler" To GCC
Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM's LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC's leading days are over.

Features To Look Forward To With LLVM / Clang 6.0
With the LLVM Clang 6.0 code branching and feature freeze coming up on 3 January, here's a recap of some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with the LLVM 6.0 compiler infrastructure and Clang 6.0 C/C++ front-end.

AMD's Ryzen Will Really Like A Newer Linux Kernel
AMD's Ryzen CPU is finally shipping in a few days! If you are planning to be an early adopter of AMD Ryzen processors, you will really want to be running a newer Linux kernel release for proper support and performance.

Dell Rolls Out New XPS 13 Laptop For 2018
Just ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Dell has unveiled a new XPS 13 high-end laptop.

The Linux Kernel Is Now VLA-Free: A Win For Security, Less Overhead & Better For Clang
With the in-development Linux 4.20 kernel, it is now effectively VLA-free... The variable-length arrays (VLAs) that can be convenient and part of the C99 standard but can have unintended consequences.

Ubuntu Achieves A ~50% Reduction In Start Time For Firefox Snap
Canonical engineers have been continuing their quest to improve the start-up time for the Snap version of Mozilla Firefox that is used by default on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. With the latest improvements now pushed to the Firefox Snap, they are seeing around a 50% reduction in start-time for the web browser.

Vulkan 1.3.250 Released With Another New Extension From Valve
Vulkan 1.3.250 is out today as the latest routine spec update and brings a handful of spec fixes plus one new extension.

NetworkManager Now Supports Bridging, AP-Mode Hotspot
NetworkManager 0.9.8 was released today and while being called a "new stable bugfix release" it does introduce several new features for users of this Linux networking component.

Intel Rolls Out Their New CPUs With Radeon Vega M Graphics
Kicking off CES 2018, Intel launched their new CPUs featuring integrated Radeon Vega M Graphics.

AMD Cuts Ryzen Prices, Confirms New Hardware, New Ryzen CPUs With Vega
While Intel announced their new CPUs with Radeon Vega M graphics, AMD had a host of announcements on their own for getting CES 2018 started with some excitement.

Linus Torvalds Switches To AMD Ryzen Threadripper After 15 Years Of Intel Systems
An interesting anecdote shared in today's Linux 5.7-rc7 announcement is word that Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds switched his main rig over to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper.

Linux Gaming Performance Doesn't Appear Affected By The x86 PTI Work
With the recently published Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes, one of the common questions that came up is whether gaming performance is adversely affected by the x86 Page Table Isolation changes recently merged to the Linux kernel.

MiracleCast: Miracast / WiFi Displays Come To Linux
For months now David Herrmann has been working on a new project known as OpenWFD for open-source WiFi displays on Linux. OpenWFD is an open-source implementation of the WiFi Display Standard / Miracast. That work is now showing success and as part of that Herrmann has just announced Miraclecast as a component to providing open-source Miracast/WFD support on the Linux desktop.

Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever
Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has called out NVIDIA for their poor graphics drivers / support in a public presentation. In the talk he called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended his green comments with "NVIDIA: FUCK YOU!"

AMD Confirms Linux Performance Marginality Problem Affecting Some, Doesn't Affect Epyc / TR
This morning I was on a call with AMD and they are now able to confirm they have reproduced the Ryzen "segmentation fault issue" and are working with affected customers.

Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps
A port of the Wine software to Google's Android platform is being worked on.

Kodi Is Getting A Proper Netflix Plugin
The Kodi HTPC software will soon have a "real" Netflix plugin/add-on for making a better show/movie watching experience.

Say Hello To Linux 3.0; Linus Just Tagged 3.0-rc1
For anyone that was doubting Linus Torvalds would finally part ways with the Linux 2.6 kernel series, you lost your bets. On the eve of Memorial Day in the United States and his departure to Japan for LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 3.0-rc1 in Git.

Linus Torvalds: "I Hope AVX512 Dies A Painful Death"
Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some choice words today on Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) found on select Intel processors.

Google Is Uncovering Hundreds Of Race Conditions Within The Linux Kernel
One of the contributions Google is working on for the upstream Linux kernel is a new "sanitizer". Over the years Google has worked on AddressSanitizer for finding memory corruption bugs, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer for undefined behavior within code, and other sanitizers. The Linux kernel has been exposed to this as well as other open-source projects while their newest sanitizer is KCSAN and focused as a Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer.