Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

EndeavourOS 2026.01.12 "Ganymede Neo" is out as the first update of the year to this Arch Linux based distribution.

The upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle will provide expanded GPU temperature reporting capabilities for Intel graphics cards. Additional temperature sensors will now be exposed under Linux with the Intel Xe driver using the hardware monitoring (HWMON) interface for easy consumption by different Linux user-space software.

A significant update to Burn was released today, the MIT and Apache 2.0 licensed tensor library and deep learning framework written in the Rust programming language. Burn 0.20 brings some low-level changes as it continues to strive to deliver high performance AI across the diverse hardware ecosystem.

Sent out today was the latest DRM-Misc-Next pull request of new material ahead of the next kernel cycle either Linux 6.20 or 7.0 depending upon what Linus Torvalds decides to call it.

Whisper.cpp as the open-source high performance inference project built around OpenAI's Whisper and from the same developers as Llama.cpp / GGML is out with a big new release. Whisper.cpp 1.8.3 is capable of delivering a 12x performance boost for systems with integrated AMD and Intel graphics.

Started last year was D7VK as a project bringing Direct3D 7 implemented over the Vulkan API for enjoying better performance and support for legacy Windows games on Linux, akin to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for newer versions of Direct3D over Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton). Back in December D7VK added a Direct3D 6 front-end for allowing even older game titles to be accelerated using the modern Vulkan API. Today D7VK 1.2 is out for furthering the D3D6 support.

Libvirt 12.0 released today as this open-source virtualization API for management across different virtualization technologies/hypervisors. With libvirt 12.0, improving Bhyve as the FreeBSD hypervisor was a big focus.

DeviceTree patches worked on recently allow for the mainline Linux kernel to run on the ASUS "Kommando" IPMI Expansion Card. This is interesting for opening up new possibilities for this external IPMI/BMC expansion card but too bad that less than three years after launching it's difficult to find.

The oVirt 4.5.7 open-source virtualization management platform released this week after not seeing any new releases in two years. While Red Hat had started the oVirt open-source project for which their Red Hat Virtualization platform is based, since they shifted that to maintenance mode to focus on the Red Hat OpenShift platform and stopped contributing to oVirt, it's been up to the open-source community to keep it going.

In late 2024 the folks at Raspberry Pi announced the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ as an AI accelerator capable of 26 TOPS and costing $110 for pairing with Raspberry Pi single board computers. Today they announced the much more capable Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 that can begin to take on some generative AI "GenAI" models.

Separate from the Mesa merge request talked about earlier today for new RADV code that can deliver 10x faster ray-tracing pipeline compilation for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, another merge request landed today in Mesa 26.0 that was also carried out by Valve contractor Natalie Vock. That second merge request now in Mesa 26.0 delivers some additional gains for at least some ray-tracing games on RDNA3 and RDNA4 GPUs.

More than two years after the release of GRUB 2.12, GRUB 2.14 shipped today as the newest feature release of this widely-used bootloader on Linux systems and elsewhere.

A new merge request opened today for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" by Valve contractor Natalie Vock provides another significant boost for the Vulkan ray-tracing performance in multiple titles.

Last year GlobalFoundries acquired MIPS while an interesting new development announced today is that GlobalFoundries has acquired the ARC Processor IP and its solutions business from Synopsys. The Synopsys ARC Processor IP will be brought into the MIPS umbrella.

Back in December we reported on drafted plans for revitalizing Fedora Games Lab to be a modern Linux gaming showcase. This Fedora Labs initiative has featured some open-source games paired with an Xfce desktop while moving forward they are looking to better position it as a modern Linux gaming showcase.

Going back many years Imagination PowerVR graphics were widely despised by open-source enthusiasts and Linux desktop users for their lack of an open-source GPU driver. But over the past few years the Imagination PowerVR driver focused on their Rogue graphics IP has matured nicely within the Linux kernel and the PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa taking shape too. Paired with Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan, there's a robust open-source PowerVR graphics experience now possible. For those interested in trying out said open-source driver stack, the TI AM62-powered BeaglePlay is an affordable way of doing so for that $99 USD single board computer.

In preparing for the GNOME 50 Alpha release, the "50.alpha" tags just occurred for the Mutter compositor and GNOME Shell. Most notable with GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha is the X11 back-end indeed being removed to focus exclusively on the Wayland session.

A Linux scheduler patch queued up into a TIP branch this past week further restrict is the preemption modes that will be advertised. With it hitting the "sched/core" branch, it will likely be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.0 (or alternatively, what could be known as Linux 6.20 instead).

While Intel has been upstreaming various Panther Lake firmware bits to linux-firmware.git for pairing with their open-source kernel drivers ahead of Core Ultra Series 3 laptops shipping, one piece of the puzzle only published today is the GSC firmware for the Panther Lake graphics.

The Intel Compute Runtime 26.01.36711.4 was published today as their first release of 2026 for this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support across their range of graphics hardware going back to Tiger Lake. Notable with this new Compute Runtime release is having now production-ready Panther Lake support while also introducing early support for next-generation hardware.

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat has kicked off 2026 xorg-server activity with landing a patch series enhancing the Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension support under XWayland for improving mode handling by X11 clients.

Tomeu Vizoso as the open-source developer behind the "Rocket" driver for reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU support, Teflon as a Mesa framework for TensorFlow Lite and NPU uses, and various Etnaviv driver work, has announced his newest creation: Thames.

The open-source ZLUDA project for bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware that can run unmodified is out with a new progress report. ZLUDA had a productive fourth quarter with now enjoying better Microsoft Windows support, full support for running Llama.cpp atop ZLUDA, AMD ROCm 7 support, and other enhancements.

Building off today's release of Wine 11.0 for enabling countless Windows applications and games to run well under Linux and being the basis of Valve's Proton for Steam Play, Hangover 11.0 is now available. Hangover is the open-source project that pairs Wine with either the FEX-Emu or Box64 emulators for enabling x86 32-bit and 64-bit Windows games/apps to run on native ARM64 Linux systems.

To the frustration of many developers and end-users, back in 2022 Google deprecated JPEG-XL support in Chrome/Chromium and proceeded to remove the support. That decision was widely slammed and ultimately Google said they may end up reconsidering it. In November there was renewed activity and interest in restoring JPEG-XL within Google's image web browser and as of yesterday the code was merged.

ReactOS began 2026 with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6 compatibility with updating its MSVCRT implementation from Wine for the Microsoft C Runtime DLL library. That improved support for a number of Windows applications running on this open-source OS. ReactOS is taking another step-forward now with addressing a very annoying usability issue where up until now you may need to refresh the file manager for seeing folder changes.

The KDE Plasma 6.6 beta release is available today for helping to test this next iteration of the Plasma 6 desktop.

As expected, Wine 11.0 stable was officially released today. This is a big step forward for this open-source software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) that has been critical to the recent successes of Linux gaming.

Building off this past weekend's Debian 13.3 release is now Debian Libre Live 13.3 images for this derivative that ships the install/live media without any of the non-free firmware assets to remain a free software blessed image.

FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan-related imporvements to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Over the past year FFmpeg saw Vulkan shader-based decoding for more video formats, AV1 and VP9 extension work, performance improvements, and other work around Vulkan Video. It will be very exciting to see how FFmpeg delivers in 2026 with Vulkan Video and how the software ecosystem as a whole begins taking up this cross-platform, open industry standard for video encode/decode.

Kent Overstreet has shipped the latest version of bcachefs-tools, the user-space code complementing the Bcachefs file-system kernel driver. There are a number of improvements present in this latest version with Overstreet remaining committed to advancing Bcachefs even with its current out-of-tree kernel status.

LLVM/Clang 22 feature development ended overnight with the code now being branched and working toward a stable release likely by the end of February.

Announced today on the Wayland mailing list is wl-proxy as a Rust crate for proxying Wayland connections and intercepting/manipulating Wayland messages.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project just published a new status report to detail how they ended out the year.

GCC 16 as this year's major feature release of the GNU Compiler Collection should be out in the typical March~April timeframe if all goes well. Today the GCC 16 compiler transitioned to its final stage "stage 4" of development with a focus exclusively on documentation and regression fixing.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard relayed on the mailing list today that the plan is to release Wine 11.0 stable tomorrow, 13 January.

Tinygrad 0.12 is out today for this deep learning stack led by George Hotz.

Firefox 147.0 release binaries have hit the Mozilla servers today as the latest monthly update to this open-source web browser. Firefox 147 is exciting for Linux users in finally delivering XDG Base Directory Specification support.

Not to be confused with the Open 3D game engine, Intel's Intelligent Systems Lab Organization released Open3D 0.19 as the latest iteration of this open-source library for 3D data processing in Python and C++.

Released this morning is the Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.27.10 that comes with initial support for next-generation Nova Lake and Crescent Island Xe3P hardware.

Building off an initial request for comments (RFC) patch series posted during the winter holidays, an updated RFC patch series was posted this weekend for LLMinus. LLMinus is an effort led by NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer Sasha Levin to provide a large language model (LLM) assisted merge conflict resolution tool focused on Linux kernel development.

The LLVM/Clang compiler today introduced support for the Ampere Computing Ampere1C CPU core target.

Auto-CPUFreq 3.0 released this weekend as the newest version of this Linux user-space tool to help you extend your laptop battery life by automatically applying CPU speed and power optimizations. When all goes according to plan, Auto-CPUFreq means extending your battery life without compromises to the user experience.

With Budgie 10.10 released this weekend, Budgie desktop developers have provided an update around Budgie 11 desktop development.

In addition to Linus Torvalds doing some vibe coding and more with his new "AudioNoise" project this week, Linux 6.19 kernel development ticked back up with the holidays having passed. A variety of fixes made it into today's Linux 6.19-rc5 release in working toward v6.19 stable in early February.

Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.19-rc5 release, the char/misc pull request was merged earlier today with a notable fix to the Rust Binder driver as well as adding the Intel Nova Lake Point S device ID to the MEI driver.

Some news that slipped under the radar prior to the holidays... Linutronix as the Linux consulting firm that has led the real-time "PREEMPT_RT" work and more within the Linux kernel -- and Linutronix was acquired by Intel back in 2022 as an independent subsidiary -- is beginning a "new chapter".

Increasingly complex RISC-V cores aren't magically immune to the speculative execution / side-channel vulnerabilities that have rattled the x86_64 and ARM64 landscape for years. Following recent work on Spectre V1 handling for RISC-V in the Linux kernel, merged this weekend for Linux 6.19-rc5 is another RISC-V attack vector safeguard.

A new project trying to get off the ground and currently in an "exploratory phase" is GYESME that describes itself as a "design-led" downstream of GNOME with plans ot only fork when needed that is "minimal by default."

In addition to Linus Torvalds' recent comments around AI tooling documentation, it turns out in fact that Linus Torvalds has been using vibe coding himself. Over the holidays Linus Torvalds has been working on a new open-source project called AudioNoise that was started with the help of AI vibe coding.

The Budgie 10.10 desktop has been officially released in marking the open-source project's transition from X11 to Wayland.

The first alpha release of Mageia 10 is now available for this Linux distribution who's lineage traces back to Mandriva and before that the legendary Mandrake Linux.

Debian 13.3 is out today as the newest stable point release for Debian Trixie.

For those loading Linux on the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld, there is currently audio quality issues, including gaps/dropouts in audio playback. A workaround is in the process of making its way to the Linux kernel until a proper solution can be sorted out.

The ollama 0.14-rc2 release is available today and it introduces new functionality with ollama run --experimental for in this experimental mode to run an agent loop so that LLMs can use tools like bash and web searching on your system. It's opt-in for letting ollama/LLMs make use of bash on your local system and there are at least some safeguards in place.

Alice Ryhl of Google has been working on an improvement to the Linux kernel code for inlining C helpers into Rust when making use of a Link-Time Optimized (LTO) kernel build. At least some of the patches are queued up for merging in the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 cycle for helping those enabling the Rust kernel support and also making use of the LLVM/Clang compiler's LTO capabilities for greater performance.

With new volunteers stepping up for This Week in Plasma, there is a new issue out this week to highlight more development activities going into the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release.

The current incarnation of ZLUDA continues moving along for running unmodified CUDA apps on non-NVIDIA GPUs. Released on Friday was ZLUDA 6-preview.48 with now boasting CUDA 13.1 compatibility.