For devoted SysVinit users trying to avoid systemd still on Linux systems in 2025, SysVinit 3.12 has been released for the holidays with the latest fixes to this open-source init system.

Debuting as a new development release today was XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 as this portal front-end service for Flatpak sandboxed apps and other desktop containment frameworks. The XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 milestone is exposing new and expanded portal capabilities for dealing with various hardware devices and APIs.

In time for editing any end-of-year/holiday photos, Darktable 5.0 is out today as a major update to this open-source RAW photography workflow application.

The CachyOS December 2024 update is out today as the newest monthly release to this performance-optimized, Arch Linux based operating system.

The latest work that Raspberry Pi is working to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel is a HEVC/H.265 video decode driver that works on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers.

The widely-used Curl project has removed support for its Rust-written Hyper HTTP back-end that they were experimentally shipping for several years. The removal of this Rust back-end comes from having little end-user and developer interest in this portion of the code.

AdaptiveCpp 24.10 is out today as this implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs across hardware vendors. This compiler for C++ heterogeneous programming models has tacked on more features and additional performance optimizations with this update.

It's not only KDE seeing nice improvements ahead of the holidays but GNOME developers were also busy this week preparing new improvements to their open-source desktop stack. There's been some rather exciting changes on the GNOME front as we prepare to cap off the year.

While the Christmas holidays are quickly approach, KDE developers remain busy working on new features for the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop as well as continuing to land many bug fixes.

Building off the ROCm 6.3 release from earlier this month, there's been a Friday night drop of ROCm 6.3.1 with some rather exciting end-of-year improvements.

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 10.0 is now available for testing with another 15 bugs fixed this week.

Merged to Linux Git minutes ago and ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc4 tagging on Sunday were this week's set of USB fixes that are particularly noteworthy. Most significant is fixing a USB regression that had been present in the stack since the Linux 6.13 merge window last month.

If you are looking for some interesting technical content to watch over the holidays or end-of-year downtime, AMD shared today that they have launched their own YouTube channel for developer-related content.

The openSUSE project announced today YQPkg as a new package management tool for openSUSE Linux distributions.

Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat just released Wayland Protocols 1.39 as the latest set of updates to this de facto repository for Wayland protocols.

Following the recent Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I wanted to expand the testing to look at how well other Linux distributions as well were performing on this new 24-core Arrow Lake desktop processor. To much surprise Intel's own Clear Linux distribution didn't take the top spot this round but as a surprising upset the Arch Linux based CachyOS distribution outperformed Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Fedora Workstation on this flagship Arrow Lake processor.

DXVK 2.5.2 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source software implementing the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 APIs atop Vulkan for powering Windows games on Valve's Steam Play (Proton) as well as being used by other software and some games directly.

A Phoronix Premium subscriber a while back requested some fresh benchmarks of how the Liquorix downstream of the Linux kernel is comparing against the latest upstream kernel... Here are some benchmarks looking at the Liquorix flavor of the Linux kernel compared to upstream Linux 6.12.

The latest round of drm-misc-next material was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window.

Joshua Hahn has posted the latest "request for comments" draft working on weightedd interleave auto-tuning for the linux kernel in order to better enhance the performance characteristics of primarily Linux servers with multiple memory nodes.