Valve and CodeWeavers have announced the availability of Proton 9.0-1 as their Wine downstream that pulls in DXVK and VKD3D-Proton along with other changes and powers Steam Play for Linux desktop gaming and on the Steam Deck.

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan announced today the second release candidate of the upcoming XWayland 24.1.

As noted at the end of March, System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution has upgraded to the Linux 6.8 kernel as a stable release update for this Ubuntu-derived distribution. That Linux 6.6 to 6.8 leap on Pop!_OS yielded some nice kernel performance improvements for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X available with their newest System76 Thelio Major workstations. But tests I've carried out of the Pop!_OS upgrade on a years older System76 Thelio is showing off some nice advantages too.

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation today is announcing they are establishing a special interest group (SIG) to advance interests around high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) for this RHEL-derived operating system.

Eric Engestrom has published Mesa 24.1-rc2 as the latest weekly release candidate of Mesa 24.1 as we work toward the stable release likely in the next week or two.

With the recently released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I've shown various benchmarks how it can deliver nice performance gains over both Ubuntu 23.10 and the existing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on different platforms. Those benchmarks have tended to focus on the latest-generation processors/platforms given that's where the excitement is these days. But for those on older platforms like AMD 3rd Gen EPYC "Milan" servers, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance impact of an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upgrade.

Merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 was an NZXT Kraken hardware monitoring "HWMON" driver to support sensor monitoring of these all-in-one liquid cooling products from NZXT. Over time more NZXT Kraken AIO coolers have been supported by the Linux kernel and with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel the latest NZXT Kraken CPU coolers will be supported.

In addition to recently working out AES-XTS implementations for AVX2, AVX-512, and other versions for speeding up disk/file encryption, Google's Eric Biggers has additionally been working on some nice performance improvements for the Linux kernel's DM-Verity code.

For those that were hoping Steam on Linux numbers would crack the 2% marketshare for April, unfortunately, that didn't happen.

Some that crave the absolute best possible performance sometimes build their software with the "-Ofast" optimization level that is a step above "-O3" but comes with the risk of potentially unsafe math. LLVM developers are now weighing whether to deprecate -Ofast to either remove it or have it just be an alias for the -O3 optimizations.

The newest SDL3 development release is out today with PipeWire preferred over PulseAudio and other changes.

Kicking off a new month of open-source releases is the release of the GNU Nano 8.0 text editor.

Serpent OS lead developer Ikey Doherty published a monthly status update for this original Linux distribution, which points to having a working OS installer soon so users can begin trying out this creation on real hardware.

Last November the PCI-SIG announced CopprLink as the PCI Express cable name for both internal and external cabling. Today the embargo has lifted on the CopprLink cable specifications for both PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0.

Intel motherboard manufacturers have begun rolling out BIOS updates containing an "Intel Baseline Profile" option to apply stock power limits to modern Intel processors. This is being driven by instability claims for 13th Gen and 14th Gen Intel Core processors having stability issues for some Windows gamers that is being attributed to multi-core enhancement (MCE) and other power options commonly set on enthusiast desktop motherboards. As the first of several ongoing tests I'm working on at Phoronix, here are some preliminary findings for using the Intel Baseline Profile option on an ASUS motherboard with the Core i9 14900K under Ubuntu Linux.

For now Fedora / Red Hat is not making any immediate changes, but the ever increasing sizes of required GPU firmware files is causing Linux distribution vendors to re-think including GPU kernel graphics drivers as part of the initramfs.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical has now rolled out Landscape 24.04 LTS as the first long-term support version of this commercial software for managing a fleet of Ubuntu systems from a web-based portal. Landscape is part of the Ubuntu Pro subscription package and from the web-based environment makes it easier to manage Ubuntu systems in the enterprise.

Queued up as part of the DeviceMapper dm-crypt changes for Linux 6.10 is adding a new "high priority" option.

Sent in to DRM-Next as part of last week's drm-misc-next changes is implementing support for tracking cleared free memory and is initially wired up for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

April 2024 is now in the books after writing 257 original Linux/open-source-related news articles and another 13 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here's a look back at the most exciting (popular) content from April.