With Q2'2026 working toward a close, here is a look back at the most popular Intel Linux and open-source news for the quarter.

CachyOS is out today with a new feature release for this Arch Linux powered distribution that delivers stellar out-of-the-box performance.

While the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window is only ending later today to cap off the feature work on this next version of the Linux kernel, already for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle later in the year there is one notable feature on the way: the DRM color format property is being introduced and being first supported by the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

With Q2'2026 quickly coming to an end, here's a recap of the most popular Linux kernel news over the past three months on Phoronix.

Today marks the last day of the Linux 7.2 merge window with Linux 7.2-rc1 due out later today. With the many new features and improvements merged over the past week since the Linux 7.1 stable debut, the Linux kernel source tree now exceeds 43 million lines.

For those using Vim with its GTK3 toolkit interface on Wayland, it soon should be delivering much better performance with pending patches.

The newest Wayland compositor on the block is Nourish, it's a Vulkan-powered and its unique selling point is offering "infinite" zooming and panning to in effect provide an infinite workspace.

Linux kernel developer and Bytedance engineer Qi Zheng sent out a request for comments (RFC) patch series on a new feature called Reserved THP to combine the best of HugeTLB and THP kernel functionality.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was a new patch series working on scalability enhancements to the MD RAID5 software RAID code. Up to a 10~17% improvement was observed in some configurations with these RAID5 scalability patches.

In development over the past three years has been Newelle as a GNOME-aligned AI virtual assistant. Out this week is Newelle 1.4.5 and it now adds AI image generation support and a redesigned chat interface.

While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only.

Not only is GNOME 51 working to replace GNOME System Monitor with its new replacement, but over in System76's COSMIC space they have been baking their own new system monitor too.

Shotcut 26.6 is out today as the newest major feature release for this popular cross-platform, open-source video editing solution.

One of the limitations of the Intel Linux driver's high dynamic range (HDR) display support is that it currently doesn't work for any DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport "DP MST" connections, such as for daisy chaining monitors or multi-monitor docking stations. But the good news is patches are being worked on to address this Intel Linux kernel display driver shortcoming.

Since delivering NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks one month ago and follow-ups like how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved in 8 years or how Vera compares to Ampere Altra that is still quite common in the marketplace, another frequent discussion point and inquiry is about the performance of NVIDIA Vera relative to NVIDIA's GB10 chip. For those curious about the per-core performance and the like, here are some benchmarks of the GB10 up against those initial Vera results.

The many x86 platform driver changes have now been merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. As usual it's mostly made up of driver enhancements for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen (AI) and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops.

One of the limitations of GNOME's current multi-monitor handling is that the same background is used across the displays. For those that want to enjoy per-monitor background selection, some experimental / proof-of-concept code is now working to allow such per-monitor backgrounds to work with the modern GNOME desktop.

Back in early May was the experimental enabling of Vulkan descriptor heaps for the Intel ANV open-source driver. After nearly two months of continued testing and improvements, the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap support for Intel graphics on Linux is now enabled by default.

The PCI/PCIe subsystem changes have been merged this week as we approach the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window.

Intel engineers on Thursday released the newest version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, ISPC. The ISPC 1.31 supports their variant of the C programming language with extensions for Single Program, Multiple Data programming for leveraging their range of CPU and GPU hardware.