To help in accelerating the development of kernel graphics drivers and any other NPU/accelerator drivers written in the Rust programming language, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem is creating its own DRM-Rust development tree for drivers and associated Rust infrastructure.

For the Steam Survey results published last month for July it showed Steam on Linux use approaching 3%. With hitting 2.89% in July there was hope that perhaps in August it would breach the elusive 3.0% threshold not seen since the original days of Steam on Linux when the overall Steam user base was also much smaller than it is today. But that didn't pan out and Steam on Linux numbers for August are showing a small dip.

GIMP 3.1.4 is out today as the second development release treking toward GIMP 3.2. Most notable with GIMP 3.1.4 are the initial implementations of two of the main features planned for GIMP 3.2: link layers and vector layers.

With the Rust 1.90 release due out in mid-September, the Rust compiler on Linux x86_64 will begun using the LLD linker by default in order to "significantly reduce" linking times.

On Friday AMD sent out their initial batch of kernel graphics driver feature changes intended for merging to the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year.

Not your typical review on Phoronix today but rather a brief look at the Gentex PLACE Any Space smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors. For those facing ten years on their Nest Protect smoke detectors and looking for an end-of-life replacement to these smoke detectors discontinued by Google, the Gentex PLACE smart smoke detectors are an interesting and capable alternative. Being faced by needing to find a replacement to Nest Protects myself that have now expired and finding many others in the same boat with no clear winning smart smoke detector right now, I decided to go with the Gentex PLACE and figured it worthwhile to share a bit of my experience.

A patch queued up into the Linux exFAT driver's development tree optimizes the allocation bitmap loading time. For cases of small cluster sizes on large partitions this can yield around 16x faster loading times.

The open-source Redox OS operating system project written in the Rust programming language is out with its status update covering August 2025.

In addition to working on new OpenCL performance optimizations, Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst just landed another important feature into Rusticl: OpenCL semaphores.

For those using the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux driver "Nouveau", with a pending fix coming for Linux 6.17 and existing kernel releases it should be a much more stable and reliable experience.

Over the course of August on Phoronix were 267 original news articles and 17 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Coming somewhat as a surprise, AMD Linux testing articles and hardware reviews managed to capture all top 10 spots for the most viewed content... Something no single vendor has pulled off in the past 21 years of Phoronix. But with the launch of the Framework Desktop, AMD Krackan Point Linux testing for sub-$500 laptops, Threadripper 9000 series, and other hardware excitement, that feat happened in August.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 is one of the best supported Snapdragon X Elite laptops under Linux thus far. Thanks to active developer engagement and cooperation from Lenovo there are firmware files in upstream linux-firmware.git and Lenovo's generally robust Linux support make it one of the better choices for the Snapdragon X laptops currently out there. In further enhancing the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 on Linux, a new EC driver has been posted for supporting this Snapdragon powered laptop.

For those looking at assembling an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO workstation and interested in having working system sensor monitoring support, the ASUS EC Sensors hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver is in the process of introducing support for the Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard.

Ahead of the GNOME 49 release candidate being announced in the days ahead, today marked the "49.rc" tagging of the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor components. Some last-minute user-facing changes have landed along with other improvements for polishing ahead of next month's GNOME 49 stable release.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc4 as the newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 in working toward the stable release in late September.

AerynOS 2025.08 ISOs are now available as the third release of the year for this innovative Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS.

This week a new Ubuntu X1E Concept ISO was published for Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptop optimizations. With this new ISO the Linux 6.17 kernel is now leveraged for the latest upstream kernel bits. Additionally, the new X1E ISO is finally working again on the Acer Swifth 14 AI laptop that I have used for my Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing.

The Krita digital painting and graphics editing application aligned with KDE/Qt could soon have color management support working on Wayland Linux desktops for enjoying a better creative experience on HDR (High Dynamic Range) displays.

This morning's "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of Linux 6.17-rc4 being released later today has a fix for old Intel Pentium 4 processors as well as an Attack Vector Controls update for handling the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) mitigation.

Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has merged a set of patches for this Rust-written open-source OpenCL driver to reduce the amount of memory allocations that happen and in turn helping reduce CPU overhead.