With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations.

Within the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" Git branch there is now queued up support for MCTP-over-USB v1.1. This is the newest version of the standard for sending Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) packets over USB for tasks like crash dumps, logging, and firmware updates.

It's been just over three months since the last AerynOS development update and new ISO spin but fortunately that's been succeeded today by a new development update and ISO images. AerynOS development remains strong and ongoing with many changes to be found in this latest from-scratch Linux distribution release.

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week's time.

Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments... like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel.

Sent out on Saturday were the Qualcomm MSM DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates to land for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 for this community-maintained, mobile flavor of Ubuntu Linux, more details are now available on their upcoming development efforts and eventual transition to an Ubuntu 26.04 base.

Today's batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6.

Box64 0.4.4 released today as the newest version of this open-source user-space Linux x86_64 emulator for running binaries on 64-bit ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch systems.

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use.

NetBSD 11.0 officially shipped today as the nineteenth major release of this popular BSD operating system.

Last month on Phoronix there were 257 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Following the recent 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com, this puts the overall tally at nearly 51k original news articles and more than 5,600 Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what readers found most exciting during the course of July.

Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud "Foxboron" announced today he is resigning from the project.

Merged ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel test release are several ATA fixes that include a number of device-specific workarounds for some Western Digital SATA drives that have been failing to work on recent versions of the Linux kernel.

GNOME developers were quite busy in closing out the month of July from continued work on establishing a formal Request For Comments (RFC) process for the project to battling the continued flood of AI-generated GNOME Shell extensions.

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling.

If the recent release of the GNU C Library glibc 2.44 is too big for your embedded use-cases, Keith Packard continues hacking on Picolibc as his embedded-focused C library. Released overnight was Picolibc 1.8.12 with a variety of improvements for this embedded libc.

AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors.

Following last week's launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture.

Last month 3mdeb released their open-source firmware for a modern AMD EPYC motherboard from Gigabyte that was built off the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot. Today 3mdeb has delivered the first open-source firmware release for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop motherboard with having independently brought their openSIL+Coreboot powered Dasharo stack to the readily available MSI PRO B850-P WIFI.