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)

Stoolap 0.2 Released For Modern Embedded SQL Database In Rust

([Programming] 3 January 09:47 AM EST Stoolap 0.2)

Stooplap v0.2 released today as this SQLite alternative for providing embedded SQL database needs while written in the Rust programming language. Stoolap supports both in-memory and persistent storage models.



GNOME Glycin Adds XPM/XBM Support To Address Fedora's Last Unsandboxed Image Loader

([GNOME] 3 January 07:01 AM EST Glycin)

GNOME's Glycin project as the Rust-based sandboxed and extendable image loading library now supports XPM and XBM images. This is notable since those formats were the last unsandboxed image loading formats used on Fedora Linux.



RADV Driver Lands Another Big Improvement For Early AMD GCN Graphics Cards

([Radeon] 3 January 06:28 AM EST AMD GFX6 + GFX7)

Beyond Linux 6.19 switching old AMD GCN 1.0 and 1.1 GPUs to the AMDGPU kernel driver by default for better performance, RADV out-of-the-box, and more, there are still more improvements planned for these aging AMD graphics cards. Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has been leading the effort to enhance the old graphics card support and on Friday night merged a big improvement for the RADV Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0.



KDE Plasma 6.6 Fixes A Common Panel-Related Crash, Improves OpenBSD Support

([KDE] 3 January 06:13 AM EST Plasma 6.6)

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with the first issue of This Week in Plasma for 2026. Last week was a warning that This Week in Plasma could become less frequent without new volunteers to help takeover. Nate Graham announced that John Veness has stepped up to help co-author these weekly KDE development posts.



Aeryn OS Continuing To Focus On Tooling & Infrastructure In 2026

([Operating Systems] 2 January 08:27 PM EST Aeryn OS)

The Aeryn OS Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS has published a 2025 retrospective to recap the project changes over the past year as well as a look ahead to 2026.



Linux Addressing Out-Of-Memory Killer Inaccuracy On Large Core Count Systems

([Linux Kernel] 2 January 12:50 PM EST OOM Killer)

A patch is on the way to the Linux kernel and looks like it could be ready for the 6.20~7.0 kernel for addressing out-of-memory "OOM" killer inaccuracy behavior when dealing with large core count systems.



New Linux Patches Allow More Easily Changing The Tux Kernel Boot Logo

([Linux Kernel] 2 January 10:30 AM EST Changing The Tux Boot Logo)

A new patch series that was posted this week allow for users to more easily replace the default kernel boot logo. While many of us are long accustomed to seeing the picture of Tux as the kernel boot logo, for those preferring to better customize your console boot experience these patches allow it to be easily manipulated via the kernel configuration "Kconfig" options.



RadeonSI Starts 2026 With NIR Compilation Refactoring For Better Performance, Lower GLSL Compile Times

([Radeon] 2 January 09:42 AM EST Mesa 26.0 Improvement)

Merged on New Year's Day was a set of 36 patches authored by well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák for refactoring the NIR compilation code for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.



Radeon Linux Driver Enhancements, Linux 6.19 Activity & Other December Highlights

([Phoronix] 2 January 08:16 AM EST December 2025 Recap)

During the month of December on Phoronix there was new and original content each and every day, ending the month with 305 original news articles and 25 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source hardware content in ending out 2025.



Debian's Bug Tracker With No Web UI For Editing Bugs Is Very Obscure For 2026

([Debian] 2 January 06:44 AM EST Debian Bug Tracker Woes)

Debian's maintainer of the Meson build system package is calling attention to the unfortunate state of Debian's bug tracker in 2026. Editing bug data within Debian's bug tracker still relies on writing custom-formatted emails and submitting them via your mail client. There still is no modern web UI for managing the Debian bug tracker as it was largely written in the early 90s.



Six Years Since The Reiser5 File-System Was Announced

([Linux Storage] 2 January 06:32 AM EST Reiser5 No More)

With the start of the New Year it now marks six years since the unexpected announcement of the Reiser5 file-system being developed as the continuation of the never-upstreamed Reiser4 file-system. But Reiser5 development never saw too much upstream interest and it's now been several years without any updated patches for Reiser5 or Reiser4.



Mesa 25.3.3 Ships Latest Bug Fixes, Intel Vulkan GTK4 Toolkit Workarounds

([Mesa] 2 January 12:00 AM EST Mesa 25.3.3)

Mesa 25.3.3 shipped on Thursday as the newest stable point release for Q4's Mesa 25.3 feature series. Now being into the new quarter, we have Mesa 26.0 to look forward to as stable likely by late February, but for now Mesa 25.3.3 is the latest and greatest stable version.



Steam On Linux Ends 2025 With 3.19% Marketshare, AMD Linux CPU Use Approaches 72%

([Valve] 1 January 08:23 PM EST Steam Linux Marketshare)

Back in November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high at 3.2%. With the still increasing popularity around the Steam Deck powered by the Arch Linux based SteamOS, Linux gaming continuing to grow thanks to Steam Play (Proton), and excitement around the upcoming Steam Frame and Steam Machine hardware, the Linux gaming outlook continues to be positive. The Steam Survey results for December 2025 are out tonight and with just a tiny dip to Linux use.



Devuan 6.1 Released For Latest Debian 13 "Init Freedom" Without systemd

([Debian] 1 January 08:13 PM EST Devuan 6.1)

Released back in November was Devuan 6.0 for Debian 13 without systemd dependence in order to provide "init freedom" with letting users instead opt for SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system. Devuan 6.1 is out today as the newest stable point release.



NVIDIA Graphics On Haiku OS Make Progress With NVIDIA Open Kernel Modules + NVK/Zink

([NVIDIA] 1 January 03:20 PM EST NVIDIA Graphics)

As a wonderful New Year surprise, there's good momentum on NVIDIA graphics support for the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system.



Valve's Linux Efforts, Kernel Improvements & KDE Plasma Wayland Advancements Topped 2025

([Phoronix] 1 January 12:50 PM EST Top Linux News Of 2025)

After looking yesterday at the most viewed Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks of 2025, today's look is at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the past year. There were 3,286 original news articles on Phoronix during 2025 written by your's truly, here's a look back at what excited readers the most over these past twelve months.



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.



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