System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.10 as the newest incremental update to this Rust-based desktop developed in-step with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what's now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack.

While Ubuntu 26.10 is not a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and thus will see limited enterprise deployments compared to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, for those not after that long-term deployment support and preferring to live more on the leading-edge, Ubuntu 26.10 is delivering some nice performance gains on current 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware.

The curiosity into secretive semiconductor startup Rosaic Labs builds. Earlier this year it was noted that Intel was providing Rosaic Labs with access to its Atom technology with RTL code. There have also been rather mysterious x86 additions not from Intel or AMD (or Zhaoxin / Hygon) that given the timing may pertain to Rosaic Labs. News today is that Rosaic recently hired a long-time, Linux x86 developer veteran.

NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard and Red Hat's Danilo Krummrich presented at this week's LPC2026 conference in Prague on the open-source and upstream Nova driver stack that continues forming as a Rust-based open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

Linux developers are once again considering the removal of the Linux x32 ABI.

Sashiko that was built by Google engineers for agentic review of the Linux kernel code changes and powered by Google's AI models continues proving very valuable to kernel developers. In less than one year since they launched Sashiko for agentic AI code review, their results are quite fascinating.

For those interested in the SpacemiT K3 as one of the few RVA23 RISC-V SoCs readily available so far and in the likes of the K3 Pico-ITX system, more improvements for its upstream kernel support are coming in Linux 7.4.

While Linus Torvalds previously shot down plans for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) in the mainline Linux kernel, Google engineers are hoping still to get that out-of-tree functionality upstream. They also would like to see PGO supported for Linux kernel modules rather than just the main Linux kernel image. Additionally, they hope to see limitations overcome around AutoFDO and Propeller optimizations of kernel modules.

Valve released tonight a new Steam client beta that includes some notable improvements for Linux users.

Back in February we featured LiteBox as a new Microsoft open-source project building out a Rust-based sandboxing Library OS. LiteBox leverages Linux virtualization security features and Rust language inherent benefits to provide the ability for sandboxing Linux apps on Linux, Linux programs on Windows, and other security-oriented deployments. Out today is the first tagged release of LiteBox for this open-source library operating system.

As an interesting demonstrator for the power of AI and potentially pressing legal challenges, Claude Code and AI agents have created "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and Adobe Lightroom. These new creations from the ArtCraft project are implemented in the Rust programming language.

FEX 2610 released today as the newest monthly release of this open-source emulator for running x86_64 games/apps on AArch64 for ARM64 Linux systems, including most notably by Valve's Steam Frame headset.

When it comes to Linux pre-loaded laptops, I have looked at hardware from most of these vendors over the past 22+ years of Phoronix. One vendor I haven't had the chance to personally test until now is the UK-based Star Labs. That changed recently and over the past few weeks I have been testing out their new StarFighter laptop that offers great Linux support and comes pre-loaded with Coreboot and streamlined firmware updates via LVFS. For those after a high-end mobile workstation, the Star Labs StarFighter offers a lot of performance potential while being open-source friendly and with Coreboot in tow.

NVIDIA today released their 615.78.08 Linux driver build with a useful improvement for gamers using Steam Play (Proton) with Direct3D 12 games via VKD3D-Proton along with a variety of other fixes.

Google engineers are experimenting with Linux kernel device driver isolation using in-kernel sandboxes leveraging LLVM's Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) functionality.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 "Hawi" SoC features the Qualcomm Page Compression Engine "QPaCE" hardware accelerator. Linux patches posted recently provide a QPaCE driver for accelerating page compression and decompression for the ZRAM block device.

Huawei engineers are experimenting with a new file-system called XMFS. XMFS was presented this week at LPC 2026 in Czechia as a file-system for modern Linux servers with CXL 3.0 or Huawei United Bus connectivity.

Following the Windows Subsystem for Linux 3.0.2 release with support for running WSL2 now on very large servers and also experimental sparse VHD storage support, Microsoft has now released a new version of the WSL2 Linux kernel as their downstream kernel configuration tailored for WSL2 usage.

One of the AMD Zen 6 CPU features that hasn't been talked about too widely beyond appearing in a public AMD tech doc is the IBS Memory Profiler. This week in Prague at LPC 2026 an AMD engineer talked up Zen 6's IBS Memory Profiler and its benefits for hot page detection and promotion on Linux systems.