After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays.

It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID functionality but that is changing with RAID1 round-robin read balancing.

In addition to Linux 6.14 set to add sensor monitoring support for the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS, another lower-cost AMD AM5 motherboard is also set to see sensor monitoring support with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Linux 6.6.66 was released today alongside other updated Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions.

Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn't upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations. But a new patch series from a Google engineer is working to get those Qualcomm CPU security mitigations in order.

As covered last month on Phoronix, Intel has been experimenting with Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the Intel P-State driver with a goal of enhancing the power efficiency of Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" processors. Recently a second iteration of that work was posted for review ahead of possible inclusion in a future version of the Linux kernel.

An interesting addition to Mesa 25.0 this week is Alyssa Rosenzweig adding a standard library for the driver OpenCL C code, including the initial abbility to support assert() on device and other standard C constructs for the OpenCL C code.

After some six months of silence, this past week the NTSYNC LInux kernel driver patches were revived for completing this open-source driver to better match the Windows NT synchronization primitives to help with Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows gaming performance on Linux. Following those "v6" patches posted a few days ago, on Friday evening a seventh iteration of the patches were volleyed to offer up some API design improvements for this NTSYNC driver.

While not as popular as their Snapdragon SoCs, Qualcomm has been offering their Cloud AI line of accelerators for scalable AI inference. The current flagship is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra as a 150 Watt rated PCIe Gen4 x16 card for up to 870 TOPS INT8 performance, 576MB of SRAM, and 128GB LPR4x memory. But given the latest open-source Linux driver patch activity, Cloud AI 200 "AIC200" wares are on the way.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy ahead of the holidays to pack more features into the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop release.

Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0-rc1 is now Wine 10.0-rc2 as the next test release in working toward the Wine 10.0 stable debut around mid January.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are busy working to further refine the Xe2 graphics performance for Lunar Lake integrated graphics and the newly-launched Battlemage discrete graphics. Landing in Mesa 25.0-devel this Friday afternoon is a new "Round Robin Strict" optimization to benefit both their OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with Xe2 hardware.

Following the OpenZFS 2.2.7 stable point release earlier this week that brought Linux 6.12 LTS kernel compatibility along with various fixes, OpenZFS 2.3-rc4 is out today as the latest step toward the big OpenZFS 2.3 feature release.

The COBOL programming language may be 65 years old since its original release but the mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in 2025 might finally see upstream support for it.

Yesterday I shared the Linux gaming performance and OpenCL / GPU compute performance for the new Intel Arc B580 Battlemage graphics card. Today the focus is a look at how well the Linux workstation graphics performance for Battlemage is looking relative to the existing Alchemist hardware with the Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14 as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 implementation built atop the Vulkan API for Valve's Steam Play (Proton).

This shouldn't be too surprising especially after Canonical's commitment last year to always ship the latest upstream kernel version for Ubuntu releases moving forward, but the plan was confirmed today that Ubuntu 25.04 intends to ship with the Linux 6.14 kernel.

Merged this week to GNOME's Mutter compositor for the GNOME 48 release is support for the wp_viewport protocol for cursor surfaces in order to provide a nicer experience on cursor scaling.

The SPIR-V target within the LLVM compiler for outputting to this common IR used across different accelerator/device types, different APIs from Vulkan and SYCL to GLSL / OpenCL / HLSL, and adapted for a variety of innovative use-cases could soon become an official target within LLVM.

Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki queued up several power management related patches this week for Intel's upcoming Core Ultra "Panther Lake" processors as well as the next-gen Xeon Clearwater Forest processors.