Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Less than one month after releasing ROCm 7.2.2, the ROCm 7.2.3 is now available with some minor improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute and AI stack.

For those eager to get their hands on Valve's new Steam Controller, the gaming controller is now shipping.

Omarchy as the Arch Linux based desktop distribution using the Hyprland compositor and led by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" is out with a big OS update.

CachyOS is a very fast out-of-the-box Linux distribution and for those concerned about Python performance, the newest updates to this Arch Linux based distribution will provide even better performance.

The growing number of file-systems within the Linux kernel source tree is causing an ongoing burden for upstream developers maintaining the virtual file-system (VFS) code around it and associated code. As a result of the continuing rise of new file-systems being proposed for the Linux kernel, documentation is being introduced to establish clear guidelines for getting new file-systems accepted into the mainline kernel.

Since last November we've begun seeing new open-source driver activity for their next-gen GPU IP with their GFX12.1 graphics engine. GFX12 (12.0) was for the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 hardware while GFX 12.1 is some new revision for yet-to-be-known products while there is also GFX13 bring-up and GFX12.5 too.

Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off.

Brush v0.4 debuted today for this "Bourne Rusty Shell" as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language.

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week.

This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code "GSoC" 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD.

It's been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with beginning to phase out i486 CPU support, dropping ISDN and amateur "ham" radio support, and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base -- or perhaps even no users left -- for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity.

One of the interesting GNOME-aligned application developments in recent months has been RustConn as a modern GTK4-based connection manager. RustConn allows managing SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, and a variety of other connections from this Rust-written application. It's been steadily tacking on more features and that effort continued with more features landing.

One of the most prominent changes with the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is the introduction of the new NTFS driver in the Linux 7.1 kernel. This new driver provides more features and better performance than the Paragon NTFS3 driver that's been in the kernel the past few years and far better off than the original NTFS read-only driver that previously was in the kernel and for which this new driver is based. Needless to say it's also a big improvement over the NTFS-3G user-space FUSE driver too.

It turns out the Steam Deck OLED gaming handheld has not had working audio support with the mainline (upstream) Linux kernel since a change in late 2023 that was merged for Linux 6.8. There was an AMD ASoC audio change that inadvertently broke audio support for the Steam Deck OLED handheld but not affecting the original LCD model. Valve's downstream Steam OS kernel has compensated for this known breakage and other distributions targeting the Steam Deck OLED have carried the patch, but now there is a proper solution upstream ahead of Linux 7.1-rc2.

Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been developing the FUSEX file-system as an extended/experimental area for File-System in User-Space "FUSE" development.

AMD software engineers on Friday released a new version of GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" as their open-source software for Windows and Linux leveraging the Lemonade SDK and aiming to make it easy to build AI agents on your PC with all local AI processing across AMD's CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs.

Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes.

KDE Linux continues making progress as the in-house Linux distribution to best showcase the latest KDE Plasma desktop innovations.

While the Alliance For Open Media had been aiming for the AV2 release by the end of 2025, as of right now the AV2 specification remains in a draft status. VideoLAN developers though for months have already been working on dav2d as an open-source AV2 decoder and that code was published this weekend.

Following last year's release of FreeBSD 15.0, FreeBSD 15.1 is working its way toward release release in June. For kicking off the release dance, FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 1 is available today for testing.

NVIDIA on Friday released the 595.44.06 beta driver build as their newest Vulkan developer beta for Linux. This was joined by the NVIDIA 595.46 Windows Vulkan beta and there are performance improvements in tow and more work on their descriptor heaps support.

We are now just one month out from the planned release of Plasma 6.7 in mid-June. Feature activity continues to be brisk for Plasma 6.7 while KDE developers also continue landing more fixes for the current Plasma 6.6 series.

Steam on Linux use in March had skyrocketed to 5.33%, a 3.1% boost month-over-month and easily the highest level we've seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago. This record growth came amid the ongoing success of the Steam Deck handheld and Steam Play (Proton) for enabling more Windows games to run well on Linux. The April numbers are in and the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back somewhat but still remaining healthy.

Wine 11.8 delivers the latest and greatest support for running Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms. This newest bi-weekly development release brings several more enhancements in working toward Wine 12.0 stable due out in early 2027.

In addition to today's monthly ISO refresh of Arch Linux that is now pulling in the Linux 7.0 kernel and other updates, the downstream EndeavourOS also happens to be out with a new ISO release for starting the month of May.

Vulkan 1.4.350 released earlier today as the newest routine spec update. Beyond the usual minor fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.350 tacks on three more extensions.

It's not complete HDMI 2.1 support but to much surprise hitting the mailing list today were official patches from AMD for implementing HDMI Fixed Rate Link "FRL" support for their kernel graphics driver. HDMI FRL as part of HDMI 2.1+ allows for higher bandwidth to support higher refresh rates and resolutions.

The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II is a recently-launched wireless gaming controller for both PC and Xbox gaming. This is a premium controller priced at $160 USD and has been receiving positive reviews under Windows while now it will soon be seeing mainline Linux support.

Intel's upcoming Crescent Island product as a reminder is a new inference-optimized Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM and targeting enterprise AI workloads. Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be very busy enabling the driver support for Crescent Island as well as making broader Xe3P improvements.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa's older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and many smaller drivers.

A lot happened in the Linux and open-source world during the month of April. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 shipped, a lot of news around age attestation/verification laws, the Linux 7.0 kernel was released, Linux 7.1 is bringing many exciting changes as well as removing of old hardware drivers, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU was released, we began testing the Intel Arc Pro B70 "BMG-G31", and much more software and hardware content that made the month interesting. Last month on Phoronix were 303 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles.

Even while the Linux 7.1 merge window was still ongoing this month, the initial "drm-misc-next" pull request to DRM-Next was sent out for beginning to queue new feature material toward the Linux 7.2 kernel coming this summer.

Shotcut 26.4.30 shipped today as the latest and greatest version of this open-source, cross-platform video editor.

Due to Linux Mint moving to a longer development cycle with their next release not due until December, Linux Mint developers have decided to begin regularly publishing hardware enablement "HWE" ISOs with newer Linux kernel versions to provide better support for new hardware.

AerynOS, the Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS, is out with a new monthly ISO refresh and details on other recent improvements to this original, from-scratch Linux distribution.

My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads.

GCC 16.1 is now available as the first stable release of GCC 16 as this year's major open-source GNU compiler feature release.

There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone achieved with the openSIL + Coreboot bring-up on the MSI PRO B850-P motherboard.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results.

Following the recent Servo 0.1 release, the Servo project has published their latest monthly status report to highlight recent development efforts around this modern open-source browser engine.

Last year with the ACPI 6.6 specification release came revised Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) support for enhancing the capabilities around this standard for OS management of the performance of CPU cores using an abstract performance scale. That CPPC v4 support is now being worked on for the acpi_cppc Linux driver by NVIDIA engineers.

Just days after the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release, the Linux kernel's extensible scheduler class "sched_ext" is seeing a lot of bug fixes. Many of these bug fixes aren't just from the Linux 7.1 merge window but a number date back many kernel cycles. This uptick in bug fixes for sched_ext is coming due to increased AI code review.

Back in 2023 the Vulkan API introduced its initial Cooperative Matrix extension and necessary SPIR-V integration for helping with machine learning / AI inferencing use. Since then the cooperative matrix support has continued to be built upon for helping Vulkan in AI/ML areas. Now the OpenCL API is also introducing similar cooperative matrix extensions.

Zed, the cross platform, open-source text/code editor written by the developers behind the Atom editor, has finally reached version 1.0.

Merged today to the GCC Git compiler codebase, which will be for GCC 17 rather than the imminent GCC 16.1 stable release, is adding support for the Chinese-manufactured Hygon C86-4G-M4 / C86-4G-M6 / C86-4G-M7 series x86_64 processors.

Libcamera 0.7.1 released on Tuesday as the newest feature release for this open-source library for camera image signal processors (ISPs) that has grown of importance for the likes of Raspberry Pi and Chrome OS and modern desktop Linux distributions with modern laptop hardware like recent Intel Core (Ultra) laptops.

Weston 16.0 could ship by the end of June with good color management and HDR support along with other new features for this reference Wayland compositor.

A Devuan developer, the Linux distribution that provides a Debian-based operating system without dependence on systemd, is working on "gtk2-ng" for providing modern fixes and improvements to the old GTK2 toolkit.