The KaOS Linux distribution remains one of the best options for those wanting to check out a polished and bleeding-edge KDE desktop experience. Out today is KaOS 2019.07 as the newest stable ISO succeeding their earlier 2019.04 build.

An early change being talked about for Fedora 32, due out in the spring of next year, is raising the x86_64 CPU requirements for running Fedora Linux. When initially hearing of this plan, the goal is even more ambitious than I was initially thinking: AVX2.

Coreboot 4.10 was released today with some 2,500+ commits over the past eight months for this increasingly popular open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS implementations.

The GFX-RS high performance graphics API for the Rust programming language and based on Vulkan while mapping to Metal when on Apple systems is out with a new release.

Feral Interactive has just announced they've brought the Commander Update DLC for Company of Heroes 2 over to Linux (and macOS) as well.

As it's been a few weeks since last hosting any Linux distribution comparison and now with the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed enabling LTO by default, here are some fresh Linux distribution comparison results plus tossing the newly-released Debian 10.0 into the mix as well. This round of testing included Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04, Fedora Workstation 30, openSUSE Leap 15.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux 30450, and Debian 10.0.

The BFQ I/O scheduler is working out fairly well these days as shown in our benchmarks. The Budget Fair Queueing scheduler supports both throughput and low-latency modes while working particularly well for consumer-grade hardware. Should the Ubuntu desktop be using BFQ by default?

GNOME developers continue to be hard at work on GTK4 and trying to ensure this major tool-kit update will be a great success.

When it comes to open-source processor ISAs, RISC-V currently captures much of the spotlight but OpenRISC continues chugging along as another open-source CPU architecture. The OpenRISC GCC compiler back-end and other software tooling also continues to move along for this architecture that's been in the works since 2000.

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has released his newest "ck1" patch-set for the recently released Linux 5.2 kernel code-base. Complementing these kernel changes is his primary focus: the MuQSS scheduler that continues to aim for better interactivity and performance on mobile/desktop systems.

Just as expected, Linus Torvalds this afternoon issued the first release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.3 kernel.

Vulkan 1.1.116 was released today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics API and comes with one new extension in tow.

The Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is expected to close today so here is our usual recap of all the changes that made it into the mainline tree over the past two weeks. There is a lot of changes to be excited about from Radeon RX 5700 Navi support to various CPU improvements and ongoing performance work to supporting newer Apple MacBook laptops and Intel Speed Select Technology enablement.

With the KDE Plasma 5.17 release, the desktop will make it easy to see a network's QR code for in turn making it super quick and simple for sharing network information with other users and devices.

Feral developers released a new version of their GameMode Linux game performance optimization daemon/client this weekend in order to allow this update to land in the upcoming Fedora Workstation 31. GameMode 1.4 offers up many features including new interfaces for allowing better GNOME integration and thus the Fedora interest in seeing this version in their autumn Linux distribution update.

As a last minute surprise for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window is support for the keyboard and trackpads on newer Apple MacBooks and MacBook Pro laptops.

IO_uring is designed to deliver fast and efficient I/O operations thanks to a re-designed interface introduced in Linux 5.1 with various efficiency improvements compared to the kernel's existing asynchronous I/O code. But it turns out there was a big bottleneck within the current IO_uring code up until now.

Landing this week in Mesa 19.2 for the Lima Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali 400/450 series hardware is a reworked GPIR register scheduler.

Just one week after releasing DXVK 1.3, lead developer Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.3.1 with a few more features plus a number of bug fixes -- including performance work.

Florian Müllner released new development versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter today for this week's GNOME 3.33.4 development milestone.

Adding to the list of new features for systemd 243 is another last-minute addition to this growing init system... Systemd picked up a new service and while some may view it as bloat, should be quite practical at least for those encountering kernel crashes from time to time.