AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux remain two of the most popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives that are maintained by the open-source community. With the recent Rocky Linux 10 GA release that followed the recent AlmaLinux 10 release for re-basing against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these popular downstreams compared to RHEL 10.

KDE developers are improving its clock "KClock" app with leveraging the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol support.

Too much vRAM and too many Instinct accelerators per server is causing system hibernation to fail on some high-end AMD AI Linux-powered servers. Having eight accelerators each with 192GB of device memory can in turn cause system hibernation to run into problems if the Linux server has only 2TB of system RAM... But a new patch series was posted today in working to address this problem with the Linux kernel for high-end systems failing to hibernate. A similar issue is that when thawing the system the process can take nearly one hour due to the amount of memory.

Released three months ago was the first AerynOS ISO release for that Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty and from there plans were laid to provide "accelerated delivery of milestone ISOs." But now Q2 is ending without any further announcements from this interesting Linux distribution formerly known as SerpentOS.

It looks like Linux 6.17 could end up enabling experimental support for large data folios that could help with bringing some performance improvements under real-world workloads for this copy-on-write file-system.

A proposal raised last week for Fedora 44 was to drop i686 support with ending multi-lib and x86 32-bit packages support. But following a fair amount of opposition to the idea, this matter isn't going to be pursued for next spring's Fedora 44 release.

The newest product in the Raspberry Pi family launching today is the Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.16-rc4 as we prepare to close out the first half of 2025 and hitting roughly one month until the Linux 6.16 stable release.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 10.11 for running Windows games and applications on Linux is now Hangover 10.11 for this Wine-based software used for running Windows games/applications cross-architecture such as on AArch64/ARM64 systems.

It looks like AMD is preparing to introduce some new APUs/SoCs still relying on RDNA1-based graphics with open-source GPU driver patches posted this week extending the "Cyan Skillfish" support to some new APU devices.

Wayback is a new open-source project working on providing an X11 compatibility layer for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components with a rootful XWayland server.

Released earlier this month were various GNOME 49 Alpha 0 packages including for GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor while out this weekend are the "Alpha 1" releases.

With Q2 quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and other Linux/open-source news for the quarter.

The past number of months has seen work by AMD Linux driver engineers in enabling cleaner shader functionality for various generations of GPUs to help ensure user/application isolation. Being merged overnight as part of the AMDGPU "fixes" for Linux 6.16 is cleaner shader support for more AMD GFX9 / CDNA hardware, notably to benefit various Instinct accelerators with this security feature.

The RADV Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance has improved a lot over time such as shown within yesterday's RADV vs. AMDVLK performance comparison on Strix Point. Coincidentally, merged today is yet another ray-tracing optimization to benefit RDNA3 (GFX11) and newer AMD graphics processors.

While a number of Linux desktop users have expressed disappointment over Intel and AMD not providing any GUI for their GPU driver settings and similar functionality like they do under Windows, there are a number of third-party open-source GUI programs for managing graphics driver settings. One of the most capable solutions is LACT for GPU configuration and monitoring. Out today is LACT 0.8 with more features now in place.

KDE developers this week have been busy with a mix of polishing the recent Plasma 6.4 release as well as taking on more feature development work for Plasma 6.5 coming later in the year.

An unexpected announcement this Friday evening is an introduction to Tyr, a new Linux kernel DRM graphics driver written in the Rust programming language. As is sadly becoming more common among Linux GPU kernel drivers is the increasing obscure driver names. Tyr?!?

Wine 10.11 is out for testing today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for running Microsoft Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

The latest in our ongoing testing of AMD Strix Halo performance using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is analyzing the Vulkan API performance between Mesa's RADV driver and the AMDVLK official open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems. More than one hundred benchmarks were run looking at the performance from Steam Play games to Vulkan compute workloads.