Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.13-rc6 as the newest weekly test release of the Linux 6.13 kernel that is working its way toward stable later in January.

With the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle Google is poised to have its ChromeOS UCSI driver upstreamed.

For fans of the Xubuntu derivative of Ubuntu Linux, the upcoming Xubuntu 25.04 release will feature the Xfce 4.20 desktop.

This morning I rolled out upgraded forum software to improve the forum experience and also hopefully help the overall Phoronix.com site performance with the database server being hammered recently from the forums.

Loongson's LoongArch processors for the Chinese market have been primarily for desktop systems but it looks like their workstation/server ambitions may be growing with now contributing an Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for Loongson SoCs with ECC memory.

Hot off the recent Serpent OS Alpha release and talking up new features for 2025, this original Linux distribution led by open-source developer Ikey Doherty is now demonstrating its offline rollback support with integration around its package management system.

For Marvell's line of Octeon line of data processing units (DPUs) and baseband processors, it looks like a new DPU is on the way with the CN20K silicon seeing work on enabling Linux support.

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst who continues persevering with the Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL driver for Mesa has an exciting late Christmas present on the way... He's been hacking on Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for Rusticl that works across GPU vendor drivers/hardware.

There weren't too many changes this week for the GNOME project given the end of year holidays wrapping up and many taking time off. But This Week in GNOME is out with its newest issue to highlight the interesting desktop changes that did get made.

LLVM development has peaked in recent years at around 37k commits per year for this huge, innovative open-source compiler stack. It was another very exciting year for this leading open-source compiler stack.

After a short break over the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back with his "This Week in Plasma" series to highlight the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes made each week.

In gearing up for the Wine 10.0 stable release that is likely to take place later in January, Wine 10.0-rc4 is out today as the newest test release to deliver the latest bug fixes.

Since Raven/Picasso APUs and Navi GPUs there is Video Core Next (VCN) as the modern unified video encode/decode block for Radeon graphics. But for those with older Radeon GPUs where there are the Unified Video Decode (UVD) and Video Coding Engine (VCE) blocks, a set of Mesa patches is looking to enhance the video acceleration support on Linux systems.

The folks at Cloudflare have published another great engineering blog post with this time covering Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) as a very interesting addition to the TCP spec. But there they acknowledge the less than ideal Linux support especially on the client side.

LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 is out for testing today ahead of the stable release of this free software office suite around the start of February.

While systemd has been around for a decade and a half, it's showing no signs of slowing down for driving new innovations to Linux for this system and service manager.

This morning the first test rebuild results of the "Plucky Puffin" for Ubuntu 25.04 were shared on the mailing list... While typically not interesting to outsiders, one interesting bit is that as a "bonus" they rebuilt the main components of Ubuntu 25.04 packages with the LLVM Clang compiler compared to the usual GCC compiler.

The GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release should be out around the very end of January or start of February. With glibc 2.41 there are many new features coming to this widely-used libc implementation by Linux systems and elsewhere.

While there was the year-end holidays, daily activity on Phoronix doesn't let up and over the course of December there were 256 original news articles around Linux/open-source on the site along with 24 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here's a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most as we closed out 2024.

Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has recently been cleaning up some scripts he's been using personally for a few years to enhance the integration between the KDE desktop and Home Assistant for open-source home automation. This work has evolved into the KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" and is currently in a pre-alpha state for enhancing the support between KDE and home automation controls.