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.

Merged back in 2022 for the Linux 5.19 kernel was the LoongArch port for that Chinese processor architecture derived from MIPS and inspired in part by RISC-V. Over the past two and a half years the LoongArch Linux kernel port has continued to mature while up to now it's always been about LoongArch 64-bit... But now a set of patches are looking to begin wiring up LoongArch 32-bit support for the Linux kernel.

Well known AMD open-source Linux graphics developer Marek Olšák landed some nice Mesa 25.0 optimizations for Christmas and now in kicking off the new year he's managed another interesting set of patches for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack.

Arm today sent out their third iteration of their Linux kernel patches for adding Arm Morello platform support to the kernel: an experimental extension of Armv8.2-A paired with the CHERI v7 ISA.

Queued up this week via the tip/tip.git's "x86/bugs" Git branch for the Linux kernel is AMD "SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO" support as a new SRSO/Inception mitigation handling seemingly for Zen 5 processors and beyond.

With the Intel Graphics Compiler having dropped Ice Lake and older support and in turn the Intel Compute Runtime dropping Ice Lake and older to just focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support, Fedora packagers and other stakeholders have been grappling with how to handle the situation. For Fedora 42 there's been a proposal for updating to the newer Intel Compute Runtime code for benefiting the more recent Intel graphics hardware while in recent days there's been talk of forking the legacy code.

With 2024 in the books, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles for 2024. In addition to the three thousand original Linux/open-source news articles last year, there was 191 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by myself. AMD Zen 5 on Linux easily dominated the list of most popular articles for the year along with ZLUDA and several of the Intel Arrow Lake and Granite Rapids articles plus the Framework 16 laptop.

Last month I wrote about a Lenovo Legion Linux driver being posted for enabling more power/performance settings under Linux. Following a significant rework, a second iteration of those patches have now been posted with just being referred to as the Lenovo "Gaming Series" WMI drivers without the Legion reference.

For the Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU found within the Snapdragon X1 series of laptop chips, an Adaptive Clock Distribution "ACD" feature is currently being wired up to the open-source MSM kernel driver to help with power and performance.

Within the mainline Linux kernel has been the open-source SteelSeries HID driver while newly posted patches are tacking on support for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 wireless gaming headset.

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2024 and they reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times.

Following the recent Serpent OS alpha builds for this original Linux distribution led by well known developer Ikey Doherty, the project has now outlined both some of their short term and longer term plans for this from-scratch Linux platform.

To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop.

During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics... Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your's truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year.

Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language.