From my independent monitoring, Ubuntu Linux had a pretty great year. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS shipped and has been well received across enterprises, Canonical engineers have been focusing more on performance optimizations for Ubuntu, and there has been other interesting changes like their new commitment to always ship the latest upstream Linux kernel version as of Ubuntu release time. Plus they have continued with various GNOME desktop improvements, Ubuntu on servers continues with steady traction, and all-around was a pretty exciting year for the Ubuntu camp.

While Linux 6.13 is introducing basic support for various Apple iPads and iPhones using A-series SoCs, the support is just that: basic. Various feature limitations remain for those dreaming over the prospects of running Linux on older Apple mobile devices. One of various feature limitations remaining are around backlight control for different models and for that there is the Apple DWI backlight driver for Linux that continues to be hacked on.

Earlier this month the Fish Shell 4.0 went into beta with the C++ code ported to Rust. Now with most of the Fish Shell code transitioned to Rust, the project put out a blog post this weekend outlining the successes and challenges they have encountered in porting their large C++ codebase to Rust.

The x86 fixes pull request was sent out this morning ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel being released later today. Both x86 fixes this week pertain to Intel bits: a self-test issue on upcoming Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) systems and also an issue of Intel TDX confidential computing VM guests potentially leaking decrypted memory within the unrecoverable error handling.

This year NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver enjoyed much more robust Wayland support, their open-source kernel modules have matured greatly and are now being used by default, and their proprietary Vulkan and OpenGL drivers remain in good standing for performant Linux gaming and workstation graphics. NVIDIA's Linux driver stack had a rather great year.

An interesting "request for comments" proposal I have been meaning to write about since last month is in-development work developing "Safe C++" as an extension to the LLVM Clang compiler and making use of the new, in-development ClangIR.

It wasn't on my bingo card for end of year 2024 but the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has seen a new round of improvements to the Flash Video (FLV) support.

The Fedora Linux distribution had another great year with the successful releases of Fedora 40 and Fedora 41 that were both rather polished and largely on-time -- something that couldn't be said frequently of Fedora releases long ago. Fedora Linux has continued pushing leading edge innovations into their distribution thanks to the sponsorship and upstream contributions of Red Hat engineers. 2024 was a rather successful year for this high grade Linux distribution.

Looking for a 2025 New Year's resolution? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is encouraging a pressure campaign on Microsoft to continue.

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 image editing program that is a free software alternative to Adobe Photoshop will not see its stable release in 2024... But just before the New Year, the GIMP 3.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing.

The GNOME Image Viewer has merged initial support for basic image editing capabilities into the application.

Bottles as the open-source manager for Wine to more easily run Windows games and applications on Linux has been pursuing the "Bottles Next" initiative as a rewrite to this software. The Bottles developers have decided they will be leveraging the Rust programming language as well as the libcosmic UI toolkit as part of this rewrite.

A new set of patches implement EC, UCSI, and PSY drivers for the ARM-based HUAWEI MateBook E Go laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs. In turn these new Linux kernel patches get a lot more functionality working for these Huawei ARM64 laptops.

Following the benchmarks earlier this month looking at the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 beta performance as well as the AlmaLinux 10 beta, on the same AMD EPYC server here are benchmarks when adding in CentOS Stream 10 to the mix. CentOS Stream 10 as the upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is largely similar to what's found in the RHEL 10.0 beta but one of the key differences is being powered by Linux 6.12 LTS rather than Linux 6.11 as currently used by the AlmaLinux/RHEL 10 beta. Here is how the performance of CentOS Stream 10 is looking in comparison on the same hardware.

A patch-set working on faster page installations for Google's Binder that is used by Android is on the way for Linux 6.14.

AMD's new products this year have not only been supported well on the server side with their new EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors but also on the consumer side with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop and Ryzen 9000 series desktop Zen 5 processors. AMD provided timely Zen 5 support across the stack as well as pursuing new AMD P-State driver optimizations, getting out the AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver, and a lot of other new open-source Linux code for new hardware features, prepping for upcoming hardware like RDNA4 graphics, and pursuing optimizations for existing hardware.

OneXPlayer maintains a line of handheld gaming consoles following in the success of the likes of Valve's Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and ASUS ROG Ally. These OneXPlayer devices ship with Microsoft Windows by default but the Linux support has been improving.

The GNOME desktop environment had a vibrant 2024 with landing many new features, continuing to refine its (X)Wayland integration, apps like Ptyxis as a modern terminal taking off, and more. From the software side 2024 was great for GNOME while over on the GNOME Foundation side they had to deal with coping from running a recent deficit and also their executive director departing after less than one year.

Linux 6.13 is introducing a new Lazy Preemption mode with the "PREEMPT_LAZY" option. The lazy preemption mode is similar to full preemption but is less eager to preempt normal (SCHED_NORMAL) tasks. The goal is on reducing lock holder preemption and obtaining some of the performance gains found under the voluntary preemption mode. For Linux 6.13 the lazy preemption mode was exposed for x86/x86_64, RISC-V, and later added for LoongArch. Likely with the upcoming Linux 6.14, lazy preempt should work on POWER platforms.

Both GCC and LLVM/Clang made great strides in 2024 in rounding up their latest C and C++ support, enabling new hardware targets, and a variety of other features. Plus other open-source compilers targeting different features / languages, device types, and more also advanced a lot this calendar year. For those excited about turning code into binaries, here's a look back at the most popular compiler articles on Phoronix.