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.

Following the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta, CentOS Stream 10 has now reached general availability status. CentOS Stream 10 defines the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 that the RHEL 10 minor versions are created from and ultimately a preview of what's coming down the pipe for future RHEL 10 releases. CentOS Stream 10 had been available in a preview phase since earlier this year while now is considered GA.

While Fedora Workstation has defaulted to using the Btrfs file-system for the past four years, only this past summer was the idea raised of creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) around Btrfs to help advance efforts around this CoW file-system for Fedora Linux integration. This week marks the Fedora Btrfs SIG officially being established.

Building off last month's release of the LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha release for this free software office suite, out today is the first beta release of the upcoming LibreOffice 25.2.

A new "Fedora COSMIC" spin of Fedora Linux has been proposed that would feature the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment currently being developed by Linux PC vendor System76.

Now that the initial Intel Arc B580 graphics card gaming review on Linux is out, for productivity-minded users you may be more curious about the GPU compute potential... Here are some initial OpenCL and Level Zero results for the Intel Arc B580 graphics card compared to the Intel Arc A-Series and the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce competition under Linux.

Last week Intel announced the Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards as their first Xe2 discrete GPUs. Ahead of the Arc B580 graphics card hitting Internet retailers tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on the Intel Arc B580. Here is what to expect from the Linux driver support at launch for the Intel Battlemage graphics cards and how the Arc B580 is performing for Linux gaming/graphics workloads.

Earlier this month as part of patches for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel code for x86_64 systems, there was a patch to drop support for 32-bit x86 KVM host support. That patch has now been split off into its own patch series with also now raising the prospects of ending 32-bit KVM host support across all CPU architectures rather than being just an x86-only change.

While the Linux 6.13 merge window only recently ended and that kernel won't be out until around the end of January followed by the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window, Intel software engineers on Wednesday sent out their first two pull requests to DRM-Next of new kernel graphics driver features they are readying for this next version of the Linux kernel.

AMD has added support for another RDNA 3.5 refresh variant to the Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems.

The PanVK open-source Vulkan API driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware within Mesa is now advertising Vulkan 1.1 support rather than Vulkan 1.0. But it's known to be "broken" so don't be too excited about it yet.

Right ahead of the holidays, KDE Gear 24.12 is out to deliver four months worth of refinements to the KDE desktop applications.

The beta release of Linux Mint 22.1 "Xia" is now available for testing of this desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS releases and known for its Cinnamon desktop environment.

Linus Torvalds took to reverting some code tonight within the mainline Linux kernel that inadvertently had broken support having filenames with ❤️ and other special Unicode characters in filenames when on file-systems with case-folding (optional case insensitive file/folder name) support.

While we are awaiting the release of OpenZFS 2.3 that has been seeing release candidates since early October, OpenZFS 2.2.7 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.