The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution has issued its November 2024 media refresh. Notable this time are pulling a few performance-related patches into its kernel build.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on Friday by Meta/Facebook provide for sizable performance optimizations for applications leveraging /proc/kcore such as for debuggers.

Debcow is an experimental implementation of deploying Debian packages on copy-on-write file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs. Debcow adapts DPKG to use reflinks for installing packages. With reflinking to the file contents from the Debian package archives rather than copying of files, it can lead to a dramatic speed-up of installing Debian packages: as much as 6x faster on CoW file-systems.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.21, Wine-Staging 9.21 is available as this experimental blend of Wine that carries extra patches for testing/evaluation to enhance the ability for Windows games and apps to run on Linux.

If this weekend's release of Hyprland 0.45 doesn't suit your fancy, Niri is also out this weekend with a new feature release. Niri is the scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor for an interesting Linux desktop experience.

A patch is pending for enabling support for the USB-C model of Apple's latest Magic Trackpad input device under Linux.

Debian 12.8 is out today as the latest media refresh for the "Bookworm" release with numerous security fixes along with other general bug fixes included as part of the assortment of package updates.

Hyprland 0.45 released today as the newest version of this Wayland compositor focused on being an independent, very customizable, and dynamic tiling compositor.

Longtime NVIDIA Linux engineer Aaron Plattner shared a status update on Friday around the current feature parity difference between the NVIDIA driver stack on X11 and under (X)Wayland.

Friday saw a final round of "drm-misc-next" feature updates ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. The DRM Panic code continues to be enhanced for improving this "Blue Screen of Death" like experience on the Linux desktop.

A set of Friday night patches provide for some exciting context switching optimizations to the Linux kernel.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development recap of all the interesting Plasma desktop changes to have landed over the past week.

Microsoft overnight released the newest version of their Azure Linux 3.0 in-house Linux distribution that is used by a variety of internal services at the company as well as external customers.

The belated first release candidate of Mesa 24.3 is now available for testing of the upgraded OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers commonly used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Following a one week delay, Wine 9.21 has been released as the latest development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems. We are also closing in on the approaching Wine 10.0 stable release.

OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release as a big step forward for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

A patch is working its way to the mainline Linux kernel for addressing an annoyance affecting new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops.

Last week Google announced the general availability of their C4A instances powered by their in-house Axion processors. I delivered launch-day benchmarks looking at the Google Axion CPU performance with the C4A instances compared to other Google Cloud instance types powered by Ampere Altra and Intel Xeon. In this article is a look at how the Google Axion processor performance compares to the competing Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processor.

Earlier this year was a Fedora change proposal seeking to make KDE Plasma the default over GNOME for Fedora 42. A compromise of sorts has now been settled on with the Fedora Desktop Spin being promoted to an "Edition" status that will put it on the same level as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation Edition.

Intel's Linux kernel test robot has reported a 3888.9% performance improvement in the mainline Linux kernel as of this past week.