Following the holidays, Linux 6.19-rc4 was released today in working toward the Linux 6.19 stable kernel release in early February.

GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by "orders of magnitude" for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head.

Package updates for the Arch Linux powered Manjaro Linux distribution have been pushed out for Manjaro 26.0 "Anh-Linh" while updated ISOs are expected to soon become available. The Manjaro 26.0 milestone brings KDE Plasma 6.5 and GNOME 49 but with both of those you may lose X11 session support so they are recommending their Xfce Edition for wanting wanting to continue using an X.Org desktop session.

For those with fond memories of Puppy Linux as a very lightweight Linux distribution, released last month was a new TrixiePup64 for continuing the Puppy Linux spirit atop Debian. The new TrixiePup64 is based on Debian 13 components while shipping in both X11 and Wayland flavors. Out now is TrixiePup64 2601 as the latest iteration of this lightweight Linux distribution.

Worked on back in 2024 for the Linux kernel was a built-in counter to keep track of the number of hung tasks since boot. That feature for keeping track of the number of hung tasks since boot was merged in Linux 6.13 and exposed via /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_detect_count. For helping ease use around it, new code working its way to the kernel will allow resetting that "hung_task_detect_count" counter.

Following Linux 6.19 adding support for CRKD guitar controllers, new patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are bringing some additional guitar controllers to Linux. This latest work is around enabling the Rock Band 4 guitars for the PlayStation 4 and PS5 consoles to work under Linux.

A new feature being worked on recently for the AMDKFD kernel compute driver is batch user pointer "userptr" allocation support. With this new user-space API it will become possible to support allocating multiple non-contiguous CPU virtual address ranges that map to a single contiguous GPU virtual address.

In addition to the release of Stoolap 0.2 as a modern embedded SQL database written in Rust, Fjall 3.0 is available as another Rust-written database solution. Fjall is a log-structured, embedable key-value storage engine akin to RocksDB but with the benefit of being written in Rust. With Fjall 3.0 its performance is now very competitive.

While Fex-Emu has been getting a lot of attention lately for being Valve-sponsored and powering the upcoming Steam Frame, Box64 continues making progress as another great open-source project for running x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64 Linux as well as an eye on other architectures like RISC-V.

Ahead of the initial batch of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased at CES next week in Las Vegas, we're seeing last minute quirk updates for these products expected to soon come to market.

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'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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.