On Saturday was the GNOME 48 feature freeze and landing during the final moments of this feature development period was new High Dynamic Range (HDR) code for Mutter and the toggling within the GNOME Control Center.

It's been a while since having anything new to report on the 0 A.D. open-source real-time strategy (RTS) game but this week marked the 0 A.D. Alpha 27 release that they also hope will be their last alpha version.

This Week in GNOME is out with its newest development summary as we embark on the GNOME 48 feature freeze.

The Steam on Linux marketshare ended 2024 with a 2.29% against Windows at 96.1% and macOS at 1.61%. The Steam Survey numbers for January were posted this evening and they show a sizable dip for the Linux gaming use but there are also other odd discrepancies with the updated monthly figures.

GTK developers have been holding another hackfest this week for the annual FOSDEM developer conference happening this weekend in Brussels. GTK developers are working toward the GTK 4.18 stable release and continuing to think more about GTK 5.

Merged on Friday to the Linux 6.14 kernel were the Kbuild feature changes for this cycle. Most notable with these kernel build changes is the introduction of the gendwarfksyms tool that is used as part of the ongoing Rust programming language push within the Linux kernel.

During the month of January on Phoronix were 292 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 13 featured-length Linux hardware reviews and other multi-page benchmark specials. Here's a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source news and content over the past month.

The RISC-V CPU architecture feature updates have now been submitted and merged for the nearly-over Linux 6.14 merge window.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekly recap of all the interesting KDE Plasma changes for the past week. With less than two weeks until the Plasma 6.3 stable release, Nate Graham began his weekly update by remarking that the Plasma 6.3 desktop is "looking pretty good!"

While Wine 10.0 recently debuted with the initial Wine Wayland driver, that native Wayland support is still in early form with various limitations and yet-to-be-implemented features... One of the newly-opened merge requests for filling in another gap is clipboard support for the Wine Wayland driver.

Red Hat engineers have been working on Nova as an open-source driver successor to the Nouveau driver for upstream NVIDIA GPU support within the Linux kernel that can be used with the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. Unlike the prior larger RFC patch series, sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today were some small patches for introducing "NOVA-Core" that would serve as the initial base for this modern NVIDIA Linux kernel DRM driver. Over time and succeeding kernel releases, the NOVA code would be built up until ultimately becoming a usable state for end-users.

While we are approaching the end of the Linux 6.14 merge window with Linux 6.14-rc1 expected on Sunday, the fun isn't over quite yet... Among other last minute pull requests today were a set of patches to work on better optimizing the TLB flushing scalability for modern Intel and AMD x86_64 processors.

As another last minute change for GNOME 48 ahead of its feature freeze this weekend, the default font of the GNOME desktop has changed.

Back in October following the launch of the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors I ran an AVX-512 performance comparison for the EPYC 9755 with 512-bit data path vs. 256-bit data path vs. AVX-512 disabled. That was interesting for showing the benefits of Zen 5's full 512-bit data path support compared to the "double pumped" approach with Zen 4 or optionally used via a BIOS option on Zen 5. AVX-512 continues to prove to be very performant and power efficient with AMD Zen 5 processors unlike with the early generations of AVX-512 on Intel processors. Here is a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance on a Supermicro server with an AMD EPYC 9655 processor.

The Servo open-source browser engine written in Rust has published some of their development statistics and other figures for 2025. Additionally they have shared their planned roadmap for 2025.

Along with other Intel TDX changes and AMD SEV updates separately sent out for thei n-development Linux 6.14 kernel, there is the usual hearty batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization updates too.

One of the important pieces of open-source software still working toward proper Wayland support is the Chromium Embedded Framework "CEF" that in turn is depended upon by software like Steam, OBS Studio, Spotify, and many other software packages for having an in-app browser-type experience. The good news is there has been some recent progress on native Wayland support for CEF.

The FUSE code within the Linux kernel for enabling file-systems in user-space has a new performance capability up its sleeve with now supporting IO_uring communication between kernel and user-space.

All of the Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) driver updates were merged this week as we reach the end of the Linux 6.14 merge window.

Mesa 25.0 feature development is now over with the code having been branched from Mesa Git and the Mesa 25.0-rc1 release candidate issued. Mesa 25.0 is to be the next quarterly feature release for these open-source 3D graphics drivers and will hopefully see its stable debut before the end of February. In turn Mesa 25.0 will be found with the likes of Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 25.04 for providing the newest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, including for upcoming AMD RDNA4 graphics.