While not talked about as much as raw performance and other factors, but in the recent testing of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, it was observed that the GNOME Wayland session by default on Ubuntu 21.10 is delivering better battery life / lower power consumption than using the GNOME X.Org session.

Well known open-source video game SuperTux that is inspired by Super Mario Bros is out with its first release in one and a half years for the Tux-themed platform game.

Arch-based Manjaro Linux is out with version 21.2 "Qonos" ahead of the holidays in offering some nice incremental updates for this popular enthusiast distribution.

For those wanting to pickup some new games to enjoy around the holidays and/or expand your game collection ahead of the Steam Deck beginning to ship next quarter, Valve's Winter Sale is now underway.

While the VKD3D-Proton fork has been very active and running an increasing number of Direct3D 12 Windows games well as part of Valve's Steam Play, CodeWeavers and the upstream Wine community does continue working on VKD3D. CodeWeavers is planning to make big improvements to VKD3D in 2022 to offer better DirectX 12 support with their commercial CrossOver software for Linux and macOS.

Intel has now made their oneAPI Toolkits 2022 release publicly available after announcing it earlier this quarter.

Linux 5.17 will have a seemingly important fix for upcoming Intel Alder Lake mobile processors. Without this change/fix, you might not see the advertised one-core turbo frequencies being met for your processor depending upon the system and whether tuning your EPP.

Intel's open-source IWD modern wireless daemon that works with the likes of NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, and their own ConnMan has been preparing support for WiFi Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP).

Sent out last month were an early set of patches working on IO_uring zero-copy send support for the networking subsystem. This work to boost the throughput potential has evolved now into a second revision of the patches and continues looking very promising.

GIMP 3.0 still isn't ready for release and won't be in 2021 but the GIMP 2.10.30 release is out today in time for working on your Christmas photos or holiday cards.

AMD's Yellow Carp enablement has been going back to early summer for this next-generation APU that is better known as Rembrandt for the Ryzen 6000 mobile series. While there has already been the graphics support to land, sensor support, and various other functionality, only coming now with the next kernel cycle will be Ethernet support.

The open-source Broadcom "V3DV" Vulkan driver within Mesa that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi can now run on Android.

Mold 1.0 is a production-ready, high-speed linker alternative to GNU's Gold or LLVM's LLD that currently is supported on Linux systems and written by the original LLD author.

Zstandard 1.5.1 is now available as the latest release of this widely-used data compression algorithm backed by Facebook that delivers on great performance. With the new release, performance is even better.

Last week I wrote about the interesting HIPSPV back-end for LLVM to take AMD HIP code -- which generally starts off as NVIDIA CUDA code to begin with before the HIP-ification -- and to be able to output that from the LLVM compiler stack as the SPIR-V intermediate representation used across OpenCL and Vulkan drivers. The goal with this is to be able to take AMD HIP code and ultimately be able to run it on Intel graphics processors but potentially other vendors/drivers too given the vendor-neutral SPIR-V. More of that HIPSPV work is now hitting mainline LLVM.

It was just over one week ago the systemd 250 release candidate was issued (along with a brown paper bag 250-rc2 fix-up release). Systemd 250 has a ton of changes for this init system and more while today systemd 250-rc3 was released with yet more changes in tow.

For the Valve-funded Xrdesktop has allowed GNOME and KDE desktops to be VR-aware, Collabora has been developing WXRD as a standalone Wayland compositor for XR/VR use-cases.

Vulkan 1.2.203 is out with many fixes/updates to the specification documentation to end out the year as well as introducing three new extensions.

For those with extra time around the end-of-year holidays, helloSystem 0.7 is now available as the newest update to this leading BSD-based desktop operating system that is inspired by Apple macOS but powered by FreeBSD.

An Alibaba engineer is proposing a standalone SM3 crypto library within the Linux kernel and with optimizations for x86_64 AVX usage nets up to a 38% performance improvement for this crypto algorithm.

OpenBLAS as the popular, open-source BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library implementation posted its newest release on Sunday.

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.16 for testing this Christmas week.

Making a Sunday debut are the amd-pstate v6 patches as the latest iteration of this work for improving the AMD CPU frequency control behavior on Linux for more optimized power efficiency with modern Zen 2 / Zen 3 series (and future) processors.

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there has been mainline Linux driver support for select NZXT all-in-one water cooling solutions while for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel is another new NZXT driver for some of their other products.

Coming as a surprise to end out the week is confirmation that the lead developer and architect for Intel's Linux Vulkan driver has left the company.

Last year with Linux 5.10 FUSE added DAX support for use with VirtIO-FS. Like with DAX for other file-systems, enabling this direct access mode allows bypassing the page cache. For use-cases when running on persistent memory like devices or VirtIO, having this direct access to the storage device can be beneficial for performance. With Linux 5.17 FUSE is expanding the DAX support to allow per-inode control as well.

Due to changes with the upstream GRUB 2.06 bootloader, Ubuntu developers are figuring out how they are going to be managing dual-boot/multi-boot scenarios moving forward with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Debian 11.2 is out today as the newest point release to "Bullseye" that premiered earlier this year.

Display support for the Mediatek MT8192 SoC is expected to land for the upcoming Linux 5.17 SoC.

While there hasn't been much to talk about Unigine recently when it comes to Linux games and they seem to place less emphasis these days on Unigine as a game engine, this cross-platform SDK/engine continues to be visually quite stunning, their Linux support remains in good shape, and they appear to be enjoying very successful efforts on the commercial simulation side. Unigine 2.15 was released this week as the latest iteration of their engine.

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system developed by the community with an aim for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows is out with a big update. The last release was ReactOS 0.4.13 all the way back in April 2020 while this week has been succeeded by the big ReactOS 0.4.14 update.

The ENQCMD functionality that is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator with upcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors was disabled earlier this year for being "broken beyond repair". But now ahead of Sapphire Rapids beginning to ramp up in the coming months, Intel open-source engineers believe they have improved the code that the ENQCMD instruction usage could be re-enabled for the Linux kernel.

KDE Wayland users have many reasons to be grateful this Christmas with yet more improvements having landed for the Plasma Wayland session. Plus KDE's Konsole terminal emulator can now scroll about twice as fast as previously.

While now half-way through December, Microsoft today published their November 2021 update to CBL-Mariner 1.0, their in-house Linux distribution.

With Wine 7.0 gearing up for release in January, since last week we have been under a feature freeze and weekly release candidates. Wine 7.0-rc2 is out now with more fixes in battening up this next open-source release for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux / macOS / BSDs.

After the open-source NVIDIA Tegra DRM driver changes intended for Linux 5.16 weren't pulled due to timing, they are back around for Linux 5.17 with most notably the open-source Tegra driver feature pull request introducing NVDEC video decoding.

Following the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q4 Windows driver that released earlier in the month, this week brought the similar quarterly enterprise graphics driver update to Linux.

Since early 2020 Micron went public with HSE as an open-source storage engine for SSDs and persistent memory. The HSE key-value store proved to be extremely performant with the likes of a MongoDB implementation but required changes to the Linux kernel that made it initially a higher barrier for entry. HSE 2.0 shipped in October that no longer required those kernel changes while still offering blistering fast performance. Now to round out the year they have HSE 2.1.

After being more than ten years in the making after being started by Fujitsu engineers in 2008 but never going through all the steps for upstreaming, thanks to a SUSE engineer the Linux 5.17 kernel will finally have the Xen USB virtual host driver.

Not only is Loongson working on bringing up LoongArch ISA support for the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components, but the Chinese company has now laid out their plans for LoongArch on LLVM.