It was an eventful past month with Valve announcing the new Steam Machine, a lot of new Linux kernel activity, the continued increase of Rust programming language adoption by open-source projects, a lot of fun hardware benchmarks, and more. There were 283 original news articles on Phoronix the past month about Linux/open-source software and hardware plus another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most popular content over the past month.

November 2025 was quite exciting from a technical perspective for Linux enthusiasts. As a reminder, if you enjoy all of the original content on Phoronix each and every day, today is the last day (end of day today... any timezone, not particularly strict) for [1]the Phoronix Cyber Week 2025 deal . If you wish to enjoy ad-free browsing, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits of Phoronix Premium, today you can join at a discounted holiday rate. Thank you for considering your support during these difficult and frustrating times for web publishers and for readers when it comes to the less than stellar ad experience these days. But without your support by joining Phoronix Premium or avoiding ad-block, this site after 21+ years remains in a difficult position.

On a more positive note, here are all of the most popular news articles on Phoronix over the course of the past month:

[2]The Linux Kernel Looks To "Bite The Bullet" In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions

Two patches queued into the Linux kernel's build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change.

[3]Firefox 147 Will Support The XDG Base Directory Specification

A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users' home directory.

[4]Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame

Valve just sent over the press release announcing three new Steam Hardware devices.

[5]sudo-rs Affected By Multiple Security Vulnerabilities - Impacting Ubuntu 25.10

The Ubuntu 25.10 transition to using some Rust system utilities continues proving quite rocky. Beyond some early performance issues with Rust Coreutils, breakage for some executables, and broken unattended upgrades due to a Rust Coreutils bug, it's also sudo-rs now causing Ubuntu developers some headaches. There are two moderate security issues affecting sudo-rs, the Rust version of sudo being used by Ubuntu 25.10.

[6]Linux Kernel Ported To WebAssembly - Demo Lets You Run It In Your Web Browser

Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers.

[7]Google Posts Device Trees For Booting Pixel 10 Hardware With The Mainline Linux Kernel

A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel.

[8]Rust For Linux Kernel Co-Maintainer Formally Steps Down

Alex Gaynor recently announced he is formally stepping down as one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux kernel code with the removal patch now queued for merging in Linux 6.19.

[9]Steam On Linux Gaming Finally Cracks 3% For October 2025

Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it's above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve's Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet.

[10]Debian's APT Will Soon Begin Requiring Rust: Debian Ports Need To Adapt Or Be Sunset

Debian developer Julian Andres Klode sent out a message on Halloween that may give some Debian Linux users and developers a spook: the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler. This will place a hard requirement by Debian Linux on Rust support for all architectures. Debian CPU architectures with ports currently but lacking Rust support will either need to see support worked on or be sunset.

[11]GNOME Mutter Now "Completely Drops The Whole X11 Backend"

The merge to GNOME Mutter has finally happened that "completely drops" the X11 back-end to make GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments.

[12]KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive In Dropping X11 Session Support

KDE developers announced they are going "all-in on a Wayland future" and with the Plasma 6.8 desktop it will become Wayland-exclusive. The Plasma X11 session is going away.

[13]Red Hat Losing Another Longtime & Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer

Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat.

[14]KDE Plasma 6.6 To Support Intel's Adaptive Sharpness Feature

KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6.

[15]Git 2.52 Released With More Preparations Toward Git 3.0

Git 2.52 is out today as the newest feature release of this distributed revision control system and in working toward Git 3.0 that will hopefully release by the end of 2026.

[16]NVIDIA Highlights The Shortcomings With Wayland Screencasting

In addition to showing the need for unifying DRM driver-side APIs within the Linux kernel, NVIDIA's Linux graphics driver team at XDC2025 also showcased the shortcomings of screencasting under Wayland.

[17]Hyprland 0.52 Released With New Features For This Wayland Compositor

Hyprland 0.52 is available today as the latest feature update for this alternative Wayland compositor.

[18]Python Developers Looking At Introducing The Rust Programming Language In CPython

A proposal has been raised by two CPython core developers to introduce the Rust programming language to CPython. Initially the focus is on allowing Rust to be used for developing optional extension modules for CPython but ultimately their goal is for Rust to become a hard dependency of CPython and used throughout its codebase.

[19]Linux Proposal Aims To Overcome Kernel Limitation Affecting Various Gaming Peripherals

The Linux kernel's Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem has an existing architectural limitation that there is just up to one battery per HID device. But with modern devices -- especially among various gaming peripherals -- there can be more than one battery when considering earbuds with a battery for each earbud, multi-device wireless receivers, etc. A proposal was raised today to address this limitation.

[20]GCC Steering Committee Allows New Language Front-End To Land For GCC 16

Joining Ada, C/C++, COBOL, D, Fortran, Go, Modula-2, Objective-C/Objective-C++ and Rust is now another programming language expected to be added for the GCC 16 compiler release due out in the new year.

[21]KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing

KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components.

And the most popular featured articles/reviews:

[22]CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43

With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop.

[23]Open-Source Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance

This Black Friday is an in-depth look at the current performance of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver (the Nova driver not yet being ready for end-users) paired with the latest Mesa NVK driver for open-source Vulkan API support. With that NVK Vulkan driver is also looking at the OpenGL performance using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver used now for OpenGL on modern NVIDIA GPUs rather than maintaining the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Plus the Rusticl driver for OpenCL compute atop the NVK driver. This fully open-source and latest NVIDIA Linux driver support was compared to NVIDIA's official 580 series Linux driver. Both RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards were tested for this thorough GPU driver comparison.

[24]Framework Laptop 16 Upgrade To AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Benchmarks

Framework Computer announced back in August that the Framework Laptop 16 would be rolling out upgrades to the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics option. Today the review embargo lifts on these new Framework 16 laptop upgrades and some Linux benchmarking of the new hardware.

[25]Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Linux Performance Up ~9% One Year Later At ~85% Power Use

It's been just over one year now since the launch of the Core Ultra 9 285K and other Arrow Lake desktop processors. For those that may be considering an Arrow Lake CPU this holiday season for a Linux desktop or just curious how the power and performance has evolved one year later, here are some leading-edge benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K compared to the launch-day performance last October.

[26]AMD Threadripper 7980X Performance On Linux Two Years After Release

This week marks two years since the debut of the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors. Given the occasion, I decided to revisit the Linux performance of the Threadripper 7980X compared to original benchmarks from November 2023 to see how the latest Linux software stack performs for these Zen 4 HEDT processors.

[27]The Incredible Evolution Of AMD EPYC HPC Performance Shown In The Azure Cloud

Last week the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instances reached general availability as powered by the custom EPYC 9V64H CPUs with HBM3 memory. These very interesting EPYC processors for memory bandwidth intensive workloads were announced last year while have finally reached GA with jaw-dropping results for software able to take advantage of the 6.7 TB/s memory bandwidth thanks to the HBM memory. The Azure HBv5 benchmarks last week showed how they compare to prior generation HBv4 instances while this article is taking things further and putting the performance into perspective against the older HBv2 and HBv3 instances.

[28]Can openSUSE Tumbleweed Compete With CachyOS Performance?

Last week when delivering some CachyOS benchmarks against Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 on the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, a few Phoronix readers wrote in with the question or belief that openSUSE Tumbleweed would better perform against CachyOS given the distribution's select x86_64-v3 packages and other advantages. As it's been a while since running any benchmarks of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are those benchmarks now in the mix for seeing how the performance compares.

[29]Intel Xeon 6 Performance Feature Benchmarks: Latency Optimized Mode

A new feature of Intel Xeon 6 "Birch Stream" platforms is the "Latency Optimized Mode" performance setting. The Intel Latency Optimized Mode will keep the uncore clock frequencies higher for more consistent performance but at the cost of increased power use. For those wondering about the performance and power impact, here are some comparison benchmarks of engaging this Latency Optimized Mode with Intel Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" server processors.

[30]Intel Core Ultra 7 255H Linux CPU Performance

Lenovo recently sent over their new ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop for review under Linux. My Linux review on that ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop will be coming up in the near future along with some other benchmarks from that premium mobile workstation. But with this being the first time I've had an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H "Arrow Lake H" device at Phoronix, here are some standalone benchmarks looking at the CPU performance of that 16-core mobile processor compared to various other Intel and AMD SoCs in different laptops while running Ubuntu Linux.

[31]AMD ROCm 7.1 vs. RADV Vulkan For Llama.cpp With The Radeon AI PRO R9700

In the past we have seen Llama.cpp with Vulkan outperforming AMD's ROCm compute stack in some of the large language model (LLM) AI benchmarks. Curious if anything has changed given the recent ROCm 7.1 release, I ran some benchmarks of an up-to-date Llama.cpp using the AMD ROCm back-end compared to the Vulkan back-end with the latest RADV driver. For this round of testing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card was used.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Phoronix-Cyber-Week-2025

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-Patch-Would-MS-Ext

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-147-XDG-Base-Directory

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/sudo-rs-security-ubuntu-25.10

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-WebAssembly

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Google-Pixel-10-Google-DTs

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Alex-Gaynor-Rust-Maintainer

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Linux-Above-3P-Oct-2025

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-APT-Will-Require-Rust

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Drops-X11

[12] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-68-Wayland-Exclusive

[13] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-David-H-Leaving

[14] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.6-Adaptive-Sharpness

[15] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Git-2.52-Released

[16] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Shortcomings-Screencast

[17] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hyprland-0.52-Released

[18] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Proposal-Rust-In-CPython

[19] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Multi-Battery-HID-Devices

[20] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-Allowing-Algol-68-Front-End

[21] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.6-100MB-Less

[22] https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43

[23] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nvk-linux-618-mesa-26

[24] https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-16-ryzen-ai-300-series

[25] https://www.phoronix.com/review/core-ultra-9-285k-2025

[26] https://www.phoronix.com/review/threadripper-7980x-2025

[27] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-azure-hbv2-hbv5

[28] https://www.phoronix.com/review/opensuse-tw-cachyos

[29] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-latency-optimized-mode

[30] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-core-ultra-7-255h-linux

[31] https://www.phoronix.com/review/rocm-71-llama-cpp-vulkan