Merged this weekend ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc4 test kernel release due out later today is the "x86/fixes" for the week. There are a few notable changes on the x86 (x86_64) side of the kernel this week for Linux 6.18.

Open-sourced at the start of the calendar year was Perforator as a continuous profiling tool to find code inefficiencies. Yandex who open-sourced it claimed that it could lead businesses to saving "billions of dollars a year on server infrastructure." It's been a few months since the last feature release but out this weekend is Perforator 0.0.7.

Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it's above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve's Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet.

The fourth and final beta of FreeBSD 15 is out today for testing with the official release continuing to align for an early December debut.

Debian developer Julian Andres Klode sent out a message on Halloween that may give some Debian Linux users and developers a spook: the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler. This will place a hard requirement by Debian Linux on Rust support for all architectures. Debian CPU architectures with ports currently but lacking Rust support will either need to see support worked on or be sunset.

Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers.

Kicking off November for Arch Linux users happen to be the releases of Pacman 7.1 as well as Archinstall 3.0.12.

Restructuring to the Linux kernel's PCI Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support is set to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle.

During the month of October on Phoronix were 305 original news articles around Linux/open-source and another 21 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. There was an exciting mix of software and hardware happenings over the past month. Here is a look back at what excited readers the most.

In mid-October a Meta engineer uncovered an RDSEED architectural issue with AMD Zen 5 CPUs. A patch in turn was sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list to disable RDSEED usage on affected Zen 5 processors. AMD this week issued a security bulletin to acknowledge the issue and report that a microcode fix is coming.

KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6.

Wine 10.18 is now available for capping off the month of October and working toward the code freeze for Wine 11.0 beginning in early December.

For GNOME desktop users desiring a more macOS-like experience, a new GNOME extension provides a macOS-inspired quick menu option.

Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation.

Yesterday Canonical announced architecture variants for Ubuntu Linux with Ubuntu 25.10 seeing the introduction of "amd64v3" packages that are built for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level to assume AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU ISA features found since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator processors. Eager to run some initial tests, here is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 performance for desktop workloads.

Over the past day there have been many reports of AMD planning to no longer provide game optimizations for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards for their Microsoft Windows driver. Surprisingly many in the Linux community still seem to think it will impact the Linux drivers, but long story short, there is no real concern for Linux users/gamers.

Last week there was a fix for a "serious performance regression" in the Linux kernel's power management code that affected some Intel-powered Chromebooks. This week the power management fixes ahead of Linux 6.18-rc4 is addressing another performance regression.

AerynOS 2025.10 ISOs were released today for closing out the month of October. AerynOS as a reminder is the Linux distribution that was started by Ikey Doherty and originally known as Serpent OS that has since evolved into an open-source team effort.

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting application is the latest creative app now supporting high dynamic range (HDR) on Linux when using Wayland.

Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.330 brought five new extensions, Vulkan 1.4.331 is now available with another two new extensions for this high performance graphics and compute API.