ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

ReactOS Starts 2026 With Another "Major Step" Toward Windows NT6 Compatibility

([Operating Systems] 1 January 10:42 AM EST Windows NT 6.x)

The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its "open-source Windows" OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility.


IceWM 4.0 Improves Alt-Tab Window Switcher, Alpha Blending + 32-bit RGBA Default

([Desktop] 1 January 09:02 AM EST IceWM 4.0)

For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager, the project kicked off 2026 by releasing IceWM 4.0.


SDL 3.4 Released With Many New APIs, Better Emscripten & Native PNG Support

([Linux Gaming] 1 January 07:02 AM EST SDL 3.4)

Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications.


Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For Dead WiFi With MediaTek MT792x Wireless

([Linux Networking] 1 January 06:47 AM EST Broken MediaTek WiFi)

Merged to Linux Git on New Year's Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.


More Improvements To Old AMD GPU Support On Linux Are Planned For 2026

([Radeon] 1 January 06:32 AM EST Timur Kristóf Continues Improving AMDGPU)

With Linux 6.19 aging AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs switched the default kernel driver used to provide for much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using the legacy Radeon DRM kernel driver. For 2026, Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has more improvements still planned to enhance these older AMD graphics cards on Linux.


AMD Ryzen AI Max, Intel Graphics & Other Linux Benchmarks That Commanded 2025

([Phoronix] 31 December 08:27 PM EST Top Linux Hardware Reviews)

This looks to be a wrap on 2025, Happy New Year to all the Phoronix readers over the past 21+ years. This year on Phoronix there were 226 original Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles written by your's truly. Plus another 3,286 original open-source/Linux software and hardware news articles this calendar year. Here were the big topics of 2025 for the featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles.


Ncurses 6.6 Released With Improved Windows Terminal Support, Other Enhancements

([Programming] 31 December 08:01 PM EST ncurses 6.6)

Ncurses 6.6 was released today prior to closing out 2025. This programming library update for creating terminal-based text user interfaces (TUIs) features a variety of great improvements for ending out the year.


Asahi Linux Has Experimental Code For DisplayPort, Apple M3/M4/M5 Bring-Up Still Ongoing

([Apple] 31 December 04:32 PM EST Asahi Linux End Of 2025)

Prominent Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter spoke at this week's 39th Chaos Communication Congress "39C3" in Hamburg, Germany. He provided an update around the still-in-the-works Apple M3 / M4 / M5 SoC and device support as well as other outstanding features like getting DisplayPort working on Apple Macs under Linux.


Intel Meteor Lake On Linux Two Years Post-Launch: 93% The Original Performance

([Processors] 31 December 11:30 AM EST 20 Comments)

As part of the various end-of-year annual benchmarking comparisons and the like on Phoronix, today is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" performance has evolved under Ubuntu Linux in the two years since launching. Plus with next-gen Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased next week at CES, it's a good time for revisiting the Meteor Lake performance to see the difference two years have made for Intel Meteor Lake laptops on Linux.


Arch Linux Installer Adds CUPS, rEFInd Boot, IWD, COSMIC & Power Management Options

([Arch Linux] 31 December 08:33 AM EST Archinstall 3.0.15)

Ahead of the January 2026 ISO refresh for Arch Linux, Archinstall 3.0.15 released today as the newest update to this convenient text-based OS installer.


Linux 6.19 Closing Out 2025 With Several Laptop Additions

([Hardware] 31 December 07:16 AM EST x86 Platform Drivers)

A New Year's Eve pull request is ready with several Intel/AMD laptop improvements for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. An x86 platform drivers pull request sent to Linus Torvalds today brings several notable driver enhancements with expanding the range of supported laptops.


GCC & The GNU Toolchain's Exciting 2025 With New Languages, More Optimizations

([GNU] 31 December 06:58 AM EST GCC Excitement)

The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It's pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025.


Open-Source Crown Game Engine v0.60 Released

([Linux Gaming] 31 December 06:47 AM EST Crown Engine 0.60)

While the Godot Engine receives a lot of attention as a prominent open-source game engine, it's far from the only one in this space. Another open-source game engine capping out 2025 with a new release is the Crown Engine.


OpenCV 4.13 Brings More AVX-512 Usage, CUDA 13 Support, Many Other New Features

([Free Software] 31 December 06:35 AM EST OpenCV 4.13)

OpenCV 4.13 is out this New Year's Eve in providing the latest open-source computer vision (CV) capabilities. OpenCV 4.13 brings a wide variety of enhancements to this widely-used computer vision library.


Shotcut 25.12 Released With 10-bit Video CPU Pipeline, Linear Color Processing

([Multimedia] 30 December 08:21 PM EST Shotcut 25.12)

December happens to be a busy month for video editor releases in the open-source world. This month there's been the release of Flowblade 2.24, OpenShot 3.4, Kdenlive 25.12, and now there is Shotcut 25.12 before closing out the month and year.


Unexpected Surprise: Windows 11 Outperforming Linux On An Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop

([Computers] 30 December 05:04 PM EST 80 Comments)

Typically when receiving any review hardware preloaded with Microsoft Windows I tend to run some Windows vs. Linux benchmarks just as a sanity test plus it still seems to generate a fair amount of interest even though the outcome is almost always the same: Linux having a hefty performance advantage over Windows especially in the more demanding creator-type workloads. As an unexpected twist and time consuming puzzle the past two months, when recently testing out the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 it's faster for numerous workloads now on Microsoft Windows 11 than Ubuntu Linux.


X.Org IMAKE Updated For Those Not Yet Transitioned To Autoconf/Automake Or Meson

([X.Org] 30 December 03:32 PM EST imake 1.0.11)

X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures.


Some Meaningful Performance Benefits For Clang + LTO Built Linux Kernels

([Software] 30 December 01:50 PM EST 12 Comments)

Over the past few years building the Linux kernel with Clang has matured a lot thanks to upstream improvements to both LLVM/Clang and the Linux kernel. As it's been a while since our last comparison for GCC vs. Clang built kernels on the resulting system performance, our latest year-end 2025 benchmarking is providing a fresh look at the Linux 6.19 upstream Git kernel built under the latest stable GCC 15 and LLVM Clang 21 compilers. Plus with the Clang-built kernel is also the option of the Link-Time Optimized (LTO) kernel for even greater performance.


Intel's Xe Linux Driver Ready With Multi-Device SVM To End Out 2025

([Intel] 30 December 10:11 AM EST Shared Virtual Memory)

Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers are ending out 2025 with a bang. Sent out today was the final drm-xe-next pull request of the year of new feature material ready for the next version of the Linux kernel. Today's pull adds support for SR-IOV scheduler groups as well as multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.


LLVM 22 Lands NVIDIA Olympus CPU Scheduling Model

([NVIDIA] 30 December 09:46 AM EST NVIDIA Olympus)

NVIDIA's Olympus are the ARM64 cores found within the upcoming Vera CPU that will be paired with Rubin. Olympus cores are claimed to be twice as fast as NVIDIA's current CPU cores found in Grace and based on Neoverse-V2. Earlier this year the open-source compilers landed initial support for Olympus while now a proper CPU scheduling model has been upstreamed into LLVM 22.


More

For three years, the young attorney had been taking his brief
vacations at this country inn. The last time he'd finally managed an
affair with the innkeeper's daughter. Looking forward to an exciting
few days, he dragged his suitcase up the stairs of the inn, then stopped
short. There sat his lover with an infant on her lap!
"Helen, why didn't you write when you learned you were pregnant?"
he cried. "I would have rushed up here, we could have gotten married,
and the baby would have my name!"
"Well," she said, "when my folks found out about my condition,
we sat up all night talkin' and talkin' and finally decided it would be
better to have a bastard in the family than a lawyer."